A sea captain who killed a crew member when his ship crashed into an oil tanker off the East Yorkshire coast has been jailed for six years.
Vladimir Motin had been on sole watch duty when the cargo ship Solong collided with the Stena Immaculate anchored near the Humber Estuary at 9.47am on 10 March last year, leading to an explosion.
Mark Angelo Pernia, 38, who was working on the bow of the Solong, died instantly in a fire, although his body was never recovered.
After an Old Bailey trial, a jury deliberated for eight hours to find Motin, 59, from St Petersburg in Russia, guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence on Monday. He was jailed for six years at the same court on Thursday.
Previously, the court heard the Solong, which was 130 metres long and weighed 7,852 gross tonnes, had left Grangemouth in Scotland at 9.05pm on 9 March bound for the port of Rotterdam in Holland.
With a 14-strong crew, it was carrying mainly alcoholic spirits and some hazardous substances, including empty but unclean sodium cyanide containers.
The Stena Immaculate, with a crew of 23, was 183.2 metres long and was transporting more than 220,000 barrels of JetA1 high-grade aviation fuel from Greece to the UK.
With both ships laden with flammable cargo, the danger in the event of a collision was obvious, jurors were told.
Motin was responsible for multiple failures in the lead-up to the tragedy and then lied about what took place on the bridge, it was alleged.
The Stena Immaculate was visible on the Solong’s radar display for 36 minutes before impact, yet Motin did nothing to steer away from the collision course, the prosecution said.
He failed to summon help, slow down, sound the alarm to alert crews of both ships, or instigate a crash stop as a last resort, the prosecution said.
Dramatic CCTV footage captured the moment both ships were consumed in a massive blaze ignited by leaking fuel from the Stena Immaculate.
The shocked crew aboard the US tanker reacted instantly, saying: “Holy s**t… what just hit us… a container ship… this is no drill, this is no drill, fire fire fire, we have had a collision.”
Jurors heard a lengthy silence from the bridge of the Solong before it crashed into the oil tanker at a speed of 15.2 knots. A full minute elapsed before Motin was heard to react.
Motin and the remaining Solong crew abandoned ship and were taken ashore in Grimsby, where the defendant messaged his wife, saying he would be “guilty”.
In his defence, Motin denied he had been asleep or had left his post on the bridge.
He told jurors that he held off taking action when he saw the Stena Immaculate dead ahead because it was moving slowly but unpredictably.
He said he then made a “mistake” and pressed the wrong button when he tried to take the Solong out of autopilot and steer away from one nautical mile away.
Not realising the error, he told jurors that he proceeded to stop and restart the steering gear to no effect, thinking the Solong could have developed a rudder fault experienced by sister ship, Sanskip Express.
Motin said he decided against a crash stop because he feared the Solong would collide with the accommodation block, killing the American tanker crew.
The prosecution suggested Motin had lied about what happened to “get back to his wife” in Russia and gave differing accounts to police and jurors.
Jurors heard he had switched off the Solong’s bridge navigation watch alert system (BNWAS), which was designed to ensure there is someone physically on the bridge and awake.
The prosecution said Motin’s failures were so “exceptionally bad, they amount to gross negligence”.
Jailing Motin for six years, Mr Justice Andrew Baker told him: “You were a serious accident waiting to happen.”
Motin had shown a “blatant disregard for the very high risk of death” and fallen prey to his own complacency and arrogance, the judge said.
Mr Pernia was described by colleagues as a friend and had appeared “quietly confident, at ease, a man upon whom one might depend”, the court heard.
His death was “wholly avoidable” and the blame lay squarely on the defendant, the judge said.
Other members of the Solong and Stena Immaculate crew could have died and the crash caused “huge” destruction of the cargo, he added.
The senior judge said Motin’s account was “highly implausible”, adding his explanation he did not initiate a crash stop for fear of hitting the accommodation block of the Stena Immaculate was “desperate stuff”.
