Spain, France, Portugal action against tankers condemned

The round table of international shipping industry has condemned Spain, France and Portugal for ordering a number of foreign ships out of their 200-mile exclusive economic zone, Lloyds List reported.

Several Malta-flagged single hulled tankers have been forced off Spanish, Portuguese and French waters following the catastrophic sinking of the tanker Prestige, which caused an ecological disaster on the Spanish coast.

The Maltese government has asked Spain, Portugal and France to state what criteria were applied in banning a Maltese-flagged vessel from their territorial waters, Malta Maritime Authority chairman Marc Bonello said in an interview with The Times last week.

And in a strongly worded statement, the round table of international shipping industry organisations, comprising the Baltic and international shipping, Intertanko and Intercargo condemned the three countries for contravening the Law of the Sea Convention, which guarantees ships' rights of passage on the sea.

"Political and public feelings run high after a major pollution incident, and everyone naturally and understandably sympathises fully with the people of Galicia in their current difficulties.

"But that is no justification for the blatantly illegal action taken by the governments of Spain, France and Portugal in ordering a number of foreign ships out of their 200-mile exclusive economic zone," the round table said.

On Friday, Malta criticised the International Maritime Organisation at a conference held at its headquarters in London for not speaking out on recent "incidents" involving at least six Maltese-flagged single-hull oil tankers that were sent off the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal.

"Malta cannot understand the official silence on these incidents, even from the IMO," Lino Vassallo, executive director for merchant shipping at the Malta Maritime Authority, was reported by Lloyds List telling the IMO conference.

The six Maltese tankers were the 1976-built Byzantio and Gudermes, the 1978-built Enalios Titan, the 1980-built Express, the 1985-built Moskovskiy Festival, and the 1986-built Yevgeniy Titov.

Some of them were effectively denied freedom of navigation, while the others "could have been denied freedom of trade and navigation, to the extent that one of these ships was even boarded out at sea.

"Although not directly naming Spain as the culprit, Mr Vassallo's statement to the closing session of the IMO Maritime Safety Committee on Friday left no one in doubt that that country's de facto imposition of an exclusive economic zone exclusion ban was being exposed," Lloyds List reported.

Mr Vassallo stressed that all six ships "were trading legally and none of them posed any threat to safety of life at sea or the marine environment". All were classed with top classification societies, in this case, American Bureau of Shipping, Det Norske Veritas and Lloyd's Register of Shipping, and carried valid certificates.

"Malta wants to believe that the maritime industry would continue to operate in a regulated regime of peace and order and does not revert to the law of might is right that prevailed in centuries gone by," Mr Vassallo said.