CONTINUE
The shipwreck of the 'Villa de Pitanxo' has transcended to the National Court, shipwrecked on February 15 in Newfoundland (Canada), which has opened an investigation to clarify whether criminal responsibility in the accident. That morning only three sailors out of the 24 who were on board survived. There are still 12 missing.
The organic unit of the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard of the Pontevedra Command has initiated an investigation into the collapse of the fishing boat based in Marín, and the proceedings are being directed by the National Court, according to La Voz de Galicia and has been able to confirm AB C. The investigation will still be at an early stage.
The three survivors declared last Wednesday, and there could be contradictions between the versions, according to Ep: the sailor of Ghanaian origin Samuel Kwesi has offered a report to the Civil Guard contrary to that of the other two men, the skipper of the fishing boat Juan Padín and his nephew Eduardo Rial, both residents of Cangas (Pontevedra).
Until now, the hypothesis that has more weight is the one offered by the Nores group, the owner of the shipwrecked ship, and it is the one expressed by the boss, Juan Padín: the sinking would have occurred during a "rigging maneuver". Since then, the ship sank "very quickly" due to the shocks of the sea that caused it to list, after suffering a stoppage in the main engine during the maneuver.
The Civil Guard sent due diligence to the National High Court based on the Ghanaian sailor's statement, which could shed a new perspective on what happened. Now the investigation seeks to clarify whether there are criminal responsibilities, which could constitute crimes of homicide due to recklessness or security against the workers.
The three sailors testified last Wednesday in Vigo before the Commission for the Investigation of Maritime Accidents and Incidents (Ciaim), an institution under the Ministry of Transport. The body is now due to issue a report on the fatal accident in Canadian waters in a year at the latest. This investigative commission began to investigate the shipwreck in a first phase in which it formed a team of investigators and collected "documentary and electronic evidence" about the ship, its crew and her voyage.
To do this, it compiled: ship certificates, construction project, alterations, crew lists, crew qualifications and certificates, electronic records of the vessel location systems (fishing blue box and records of the Automatic Identification System), forecasts weather, radio communications and emergency signals.
The Ciaim investigation (independent of the one opened by the National High Court) entered its second phase, which included interviews with the surviving crew, who went to Santiago in the early hours of February 21-22 on a flight from Newfoundland. The relatives of the disappeared were also interviewed, who gave a statement on Friday.
In statements to Radio Galega, the Minister of the Sea, Rosa Quintana, advocated "letting the technicians work", instead of trying to reach hasty conclusions, based on the information that has been released. With an open investigation commission, Quintana insisted that the technicians should be allowed to "make their assessments", while she has stressed that the statements of the survivors will allow "to shed a lot of light on what happened".
In the hope of knowing the "conclusions of the study", what Quintana does advance is that "we will all have to draw lessons" from what happened, and hopes that the explanations they obtain about the Villa de Pitanxo misfortune "will also serve to learn" . The councilor hears that "the families (...) want answers" and that they are "desperate." Also a product of the transcurricular days without finding the best solution to dare to the restaurants of the trawler, which is suspected of coming across the bodies of the victims without recovering. But right now, he has highlighted, he has to, in relation to the investigation, "let the technicians work rigorously and not rush them".
The boat accumulated penalties
The 'Villa de Pitanxo' accumulates several sanctions for serious illegal fishing infractions, including undeclared black halibut catches. This was announced on Tuesday Digital Economy Galicia, based on a series of rulings of the National Court, to which Europa Press has had access, the last one dated July 17, 2020.
Specifically, the Ministry of Fisheries sanctioned in 2016 the skipper of the 'Villa de Pitanxo' for serious infractions against the Maritime Fisheries Law. The fines totaled more than 160.000 euros for issues such as elimination or concealment of evidence in inspection controls, failure to send vessel positions, not having fishing authorizations and different breaches related to catches on board and displacement. Likewise, 27.778 kilos of black halibut were seized, which were hidden and not registered in the newspaper.
The infractions also referred to the armed group, Pesquerías Nores, which was imposed a loss of points that boat owners have in the European fishing control regulation due to issues such as the elimination of evidence in control tasks, as well as for the realization of capture data.
hidden cellar
The Nores group claimed a communication error between the vessel's personnel, as it maintained that the halibut was not hidden and that "it was the sailor in charge who forgot to remove it," the ruling states. However, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Court decided to prove the infraction reflected by the inspectors, who "verified the existence of a hidden warehouse where the catches of bagged and unlabelled black halibut were found in a total of 26.788 kilos «.
The appeals presented by the vessel owner were rejected by this judgment of the National High Court, which among other issues defends the relevance of imposing the maximum fine of 60.000 euros in one of the sanctions, given that due to the actions of the inspectors, discover the hiding of halibut in a secret hold, also taking into account the characteristics of the vessel and that Greenland halibut is a species subject to special conservation measures”.
In another previous sentence of the National Court of 2017, in which the resources of Pesquerías Nores were also estimated, serious infractions sanctioned by the Ministry in 2014 are collected, as well as that the inspectors attested to an "intentional alteration" of the classification of catches of two rows of Greenland halibut boxes to pass them off as catches of skates.
