Ship captain jailed over fatal crash off Yorkshire coast
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 was on watch alone when the Solong cargo ship collided with the Stena Immaculate, which was anchored near the Humber Estuary, at 9.47 am on March 10 last year, causing a massive explosion.
Mark Angelo Pernia, 38, who was working on Solong’s bow, died instantly in the fire, but his body was never found.
Motin, 59, from St Petersburg, Russia, was found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence after an Old Bailey jury deliberated for eight hours on Monday. He was sentenced to six years in prison at the same court on Thursday, as Mr Justice Andrew Baker told him: “You were a serious accident waiting to happen.”
The court had previously heard that the Solong, which was 130 meters long and weighed 7,852 gross tonnes, set sail from Grangemouth, Scotland, towards the Dutch port of Rotterdam at 9.05pm on March 9.
With its crew of 14 people, it was carrying mainly alcoholic beverages and some dangerous goods, including empty but dirty sodium cyanide containers.
Stena Immaculate, with a crew of 23, was 183.2 meters long and transported more than 220,000 barrels of JetA1 high-quality aviation fuel from Greece to the UK.
The danger in the event of a collision was obvious, jurors were told, as both ships were loaded with flammable cargo.
Motin was allegedly responsible for numerous failures in the lead up to the tragedy and then lied about what happened on the bridge.
The prosecution said Stena Immaculate appeared on Solong’s radar screen 36 minutes before the collision, but Motin did nothing to move away from the collision course.
The prosecutor’s office said he did not call for help, slow down, sound the alarm to warn the crews of either ship or encourage the collision to be stopped as a last resort.
Dramatic CCTV footage captured the moment both ships were destroyed in a massive fire due to fuel leaking from the Stena Immaculate.
The shocked crew on the US tanker reacted immediately, saying: “Damn… what just hit us… a container ship… this is not a drill, this is not a drill, fire fire fire, we’ve had a crash.”
Jurors heard a long silence before the Solong bridge crashed into the oil tanker at 15.2 knots. A full minute passed before Motin was heard to react.
Motin and the remaining Solong crew abandoned ship and were put ashore at Grimsby; where the defendant sent a message to his wife saying he would be “guilty”.
In his defense, Motin denied sleeping or leaving his post on the bridge.
He told jurors that when he saw Stena Immaculate was right in front of us, he gave up taking action because it was moving slowly but unpredictably.
He later said he made a “mistake” and pressed the wrong button when trying to take Solong off autopilot and steer it a nautical mile away.
Without realizing the mistake, he told jurors that Solong stopped and restarted the steering with no consequences, thinking he might have developed a steering malfunction experienced on sister ship Sanskip Express.
Motin said he did not order a combat stop because he feared the Solong would collide with the accommodation block, killing the American tanker crew.
The prosecution argued that Motin lied about what happened in Russia to “get back to his wife” and gave different statements to police and jurors.
Jurors heard he turned off Solong’s bridge navigation monitoring alert system (BNWAS), which was designed to ensure someone was physically alert on the bridge.
The prosecution said Motin’s failures were “extremely bad, amounting to gross negligence”.
Jailing Motin for six years, Judge Andrew Baker said he had “blatantly disregarded the very high risk of death” and was the victim of his own indifference and arrogance.
The court heard Mr Pernia was described as a friend by colleagues and appeared to be “an extremely confident, relaxed, man who could be trusted”.
The judge said his death was “entirely preventable” and the blame fell squarely on the defendant.
He added that Solong and other members of the Stena Immaculate crew could have died and that the accident could have caused “major” damage to the cargo.
The senior judge said Motin’s explanation was “highly implausible” and added that Stena Immaculate’s explanation that it did not initiate an emergency stop for fear of hitting the accommodation block was “a hopeless thing”.
In a victim impact statement read to the court, Mr Pernia’s widow Leacel said there was no compensation to compensate for the “pain” of his loss and the impact it had on his young family.
James Leonard KC, in mitigation, expressed the defendant’s “shame” for what had happened, expressed his condolences to Mr Pernia’s family and conveyed his vow never to go to sea again.
Noting the experienced sailor’s previous “impeccable” record, the defense lawyer said: “This was truly an aberration of his behaviour.”
