By Michael Breen
When the court in the Taean oil spill case last week found the giant anchored oil tanker guilty of being rammed by a runaway barge, seismometers all over the world recorded a logic-quake of 7.5 on the Richter scale.
For a full grasp of why, we need to recap events that led to the worst oil spill in Korean history.
In December 2007, two tugs were towing a crane barge in heavy seas near the west coast port of Daesan when one of the towlines snapped. Unable to steer, the out-of-control barge collided with the Hong Kong-registered Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) Hebei Spirit, which was at anchor waiting for a berth at the port.
I should interrupt here and mention that the tanker is Chinese, registered in Hong Kong, and the barge is Korean, owned by an affiliate of the Snagums Group, which is best spelt anagrammatically given its apparent chumminess with prosecutors.
As the Sansmug barge scraped along the tanker's side, it punched holes in three of the vessel's five massive oil tanks. The Hebei Spirit was fully loaded with 260,000 tons of crude oil. Almost 11,000 tons leaked into the sea and washed up on the shore, seriously impacting the livelihood of fishing communities and causing widespread public anger. The cleanup allegedly cost $500 million.
A preliminary investigation by the Coast Guard concluded that blame was to be shared between the tug captains, the Gunmass barge captain, and the officers of the Hebei Spirit.
At the first trial, the court disagreed with this finding, and said instead that the officers of the Hebei Spirit and personnel on the barge itself were not guilty. The two tug captains were found guilty and the barge owner, Smugans, was fined.
In the appeal last week, Daejeon District Court reduced the jail terms of the tug masters, fined the owners of both the barge and the tanker 30 million won, and jailed the barge master for 18 months.
It also handed down an 18-month jail sentence and a fine of 20 million won on Hebei Spirit's captain. The court said he should have gone full astern to drag the anchor. The chief officer was sentenced to eight months in prison and fined 10 million won. His crime was not having called the captain earlier.
The two men, who are from India, have been held in Korea since the accident.
The decision boggles the sane mind. Both the treatment of the tanker's officers and the verdict itself is a travesty of justice. Even if, in hindsight, the tanker could have done something, that mistake is overridden by the more obvious cause, which involves the barge and its tugs.
The consequence of, and perhaps the explanation for, the reverse logic in this case is that it opens the way to unfairly spread liability for the cost of the clean-up. It is just not fair.
An appeal to fairness, it must be said, may strike readers in different ways. I tested it on some colleagues and found that, for most of the Koreans I work with, there was less interest in fairness to the crews than concern that a verdict assuaged the pain of the people whose livelihood was so devastated by the disaster.
This attitude derives from obedience to what is known in Korea as the Law of Public Sentiment, which, although unwritten, is greater than actual law, for the Taoist part of the Korean make-up says that which is felt but which cannot be spoken is of greater value than that which can be made explicit.
In other societies, it's known as mob rule.
Well, if you can't beat 'em, you have to join them. You want a public sentiment? How's about The International Transport Workers' Federation? It represents 600,000 seafarers around the world, who are being mobilized to campaign. The federation called the Korean court decision ``incomprehensibly vindictive." It said, ``This is not justice. It's not even something close. What we have seen today is scapegoating, criminalization and a refusal to consider the wider body of evidence that calls into question the propriety of the court."
Intertanko, an association representing 80 percent of all independent tanker owners, published an open letter to President Lee Myung-bak in this newspaper claiming that data supplied to the court by the Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal was not up to international standards.
Roberto Giorgi, the president of ship management group V Ships, that employs the ship's officers, has gone on record saying that Assmung lawyers, prosecutors and investigators had colluded.
That's illegal, isn't it?
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants Exclusive Partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com