The last legal action in a casualty case against Italian shipowner Raffaele Brullo has been dropped.
Brullo’s tanker company Augusta Due said on Monday that the Court of Rome upheld a request by the city’s public prosecutor to discontinue the case relating to an alleged collision in May 2020 involving the 11,300-dwt Vulcanello M (built 2006) and a fishing boat called Nuova Iside that killed three men on the smaller vessel.
The decision follows similar ones clearing Brullo by the Court of Review in Palermo and the Supreme Court.
Rome-based Augusta Due said its principal had been accused of having concealed evidence of the alleged collision off Sicily.
Brullo was subject to preliminary investigations in Palermo where the prosecutor’s office unsuccessfully tried to demonstrate the shipowner ordered the tanker’s hull be repainted.
But the probe proved there was no sign of a collision on the hull and the direction to repaint the ship had been given two weeks before the accident.
“Once and for all, the public prosecutor in Rome decided to dismiss all proceedings against Raffaele Brullo, by declaring absolutely groundless all accusations and restoring him to the full dignity of a correct entrepreneur, dignity of which an unfounded circumstantial investigation had publicly deprived him,” Augusta Due said.
Brullo had been placed under house arrest in February 2021.
He was then freed by an appeals court on 4 April and the Court of Palermo withdrew the house arrest order completely.
Tanker officers arrested
The Palermo court ruled at that time there was “no conscious and deliberate intention to artfully interfere with the state and conditions of the ship nor to support the behaviour of others by way of moral complicity”.
Brullo kept running the company during the probe.
The master and third mate of the Augusta Due tanker were also arrested in February by the Italian coastguard.
The master was named by La Repubblica as Gioacchino Costagliola and his colleague as Giuseppe Caratozzolo.
Brullo and the two seafarers had always proclaimed their innocence.
The three seafarers killed on the fishing boat were father and son Matteo and Vito Lo Iacono, and cousin Giuseppe Lo Iacono.
