A court in the US has rewarded a tip to inspectors about illegal discharge practices.<\/p>\n
A crew member from a Leif Hoegh-controlled bulk carrier has been awarded a $300,000 pay-out by a US court for alerting ship inspectors to illegal discharge practices taking place on his vessel last year.<\/p>\n
A statement from the US Department of Justice United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington said the illegal dumping on the ship came to light after the whistle-blower secretly passed a note to Coast Guard inspectors describing the illegal activity taking place onboard the 44,000-dwt bulk carrier Hoegh Minerv<\/em>a(built 1979).<\/p>\n An investigation in Vancouver led to the discovery of the so-called “magic pipe” that was used to bypass the oily water separator and dump waste oil directly into the sea.<\/p>\n The unnamed crew member also revealed to inspectors that at least four Hoegh car carriers had been using the same system.<\/p>\n The statement said the US Attorneys for Western Washington, Northern and Central Districts of California “applauded the courageous actions of a crew member aboard the M\/V Hoegh Minerva<\/em>“.<\/p>\n The cash pay-out was detailed as Hoegh was officially sentenced to pay the $3.5m fine for seven felony charges relating to the falsification of records concealing the intentional dumping of waste oil into the ocean. Hoegh first learned about its $3.5m fine in March. The company was also placed under a four-year court probation.<\/p>\n The Hoegh Minerva’s<\/em> second engineer, Vincent Genovana, agreed to co-operate with the government in its investigation. In February he was sentenced to 30 days in custody followed by two years of supervised release.<\/p>\n Hoegh pleaded guilty and the owner’s management subsidiary, Hoegh Fleet Services, agreed to implement a comprehensive environmental compliance plan for its 38 ships that call regularly in the US.<\/p>\n Some $1.6m of the fine will be used to fund environmental projects that benefit coastal ecosystems of Washington and California.<\/p>\n A Hoegh spokesman tells Tradewinds the company is implementing the compliance programme and has upgraded equipment across the whole fleet in order to avoid a repeat of the episode.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A court in the US has rewarded a tip to inspectors about illegal discharge practices. A crew member from a Leif Hoegh-controlled bulk carrier has been awarded a $300,000 pay-out by a US court for alerting ship inspectors to illegal discharge practices taking place on his vessel last year. A statement from the US Department […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[125],"class_list":["post-8542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-information","tag-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21269,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8542\/revisions\/21269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewliu.com.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}