The Hamburg Public Prosecutor has charged three people over the sale of a container ship that was recycled in India allegedly in breach of European Union environmental waste laws.
The ship and the company involved have not been named by the public prosecutor.
Ship recycling lobby group NGO Shipbreaking Platform named the ship as the 3,104-teu CS Discovery (built 2001), which was sold for recycling and broken up in Alang, India, in 2017.
The ship’s final voyage was from Italy to Alang. Under the EU’s Waste Shipment Regulation, it is illegal to dispose of waste originating in Europe in non-OECD countries.
According to a note from the Hamburg Public Prosecutor, two people have been charged with selling the ship to a Hong Kong-based cash buyer allegedly in the knowledge that it would be scrapped in India “under conditions that do not meet normal environmental standards”.
A third person has been charged with selling the vessel for recycling to Alang.
The vessel was sold for demolition at a price of around $4.7m.
At the time, the ship had 14,000 tonnes of hazardous waste on board.
The CS Discovery was formerly owned by Peter Dohle. The company declined to comment on the case.
The case is the latest in a series of prosecutions for ship recycling within Europe.
Among the most recent cases, Norwegian shipowner George Eide was sentenced to six months in prison by a Norwegian court over the sale of the 38,200-dwt barge carrier Harrier (ex-Eide Carrier, built 1989) for recycling in Pakistan.
Dutch heavylift firm Jumbo and two of its directors were fined by a Rotterdam court in connection with selling two vessels for demolition in breach of notification procedures under the European Waste Shipment Regulation.
Jumbo was fined €25,000 ($28,000), and the two directors were fined €2,500 each, for violations related to the demolition sales to a Turkish yard that date back to 2014 and 2015.
