Press Release – Seatrade convicted for trafficking toxic ships
Today, the Rotterdam District Court sentenced, on the basis of the EU Waste Shipment Regulation, shipping company Seatrade for the illegal export of vessels sent for scrapping on the beaches of South Asia. The Seatrade company has been heavily fined, and two of its executives have also been banned from exercising the profession as director, commissioner, advisor or employee of a shipping company for one year.
For the first time, a European shipping company has been held criminally liable for having sold vessels for scrap to substandard shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh, where, as widely acknowledged and according to the Prosecutor, “current ship dismantling methods endanger the lives and health of workers and pollute the environment”. The Prosecutor’s request that the Seatrade executives face prison was only waived in light of this being the first time such criminal charges had been pressed.
This groundbreaking judgement sets a European-wide precedent for holding ship owners accountable for knowingly selling vessels, via shady cash-buyers, for dirty and dangerous breaking in order to maximize profits.


Related news

Press Release – Maersk end-of-life vessels to hit the beaches again. NGOs denounce container ship company’s step back to boost profits
The NGO Shipbreaking Platform and Transport and Environment (T&E) denounce Maersk Group’s decision to beach their end-of-life vessels in India [1]. The world’s leading container ship owner… Read More

Platform publishes South Asia Quarterly Update #15
There were a total of 206 ships broken in the first quarter of 2018. Of these, 152 ships were sold to the beaches of South Asia for… Read More

Press Release – Europe has capacity to recycle its ships, new data shows – yet shipowners want to use dangerous, polluting yards abroad
Ship recycling yards approved by the EU will have enough capacity to handle demand from EU-flagged ships that need to be scrapped, a new analysis shows. The… Read More

Press Release – Container shipping asked to clean up its act in view of upcoming scrapping wave
Numerous container ships are predicted to be sold for scrapping in the near future.
... Read More
Press Release – The hypocrisy of better beaches: winners of the “Public Eye Investigation Award” shed light on shipbreaking in Alang and Swiss companies’ involvement
Gie Goris and Nicola Mulinaris received Public Eye’s “Investigation Award”.
... Read More
Platform News – ‘With Bare Hands’: an immersive journey into the problems of shipbreaking
International media outlets publish ‘With bare hands’, the first multimedia and data-driven reporting project that documents the negative impacts on the environment and the human costs of… Read More