Shipping Companies Fined $1.75 Million After Crew Concealed Oily Waste Discharges at Sea

Key Takeaways

• $1.75 Million Fine: MSC Shipmanagement Limited and Hong Kong Spirit Shipping and Trading Limited were sentenced to pay a combined $1.75 million fine after each pleaded guilty to two violations of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships.
• Pollution Controls Deliberately Circumvented: Senior engine department officers used portable pumps and hoses to bypass the vessel’s oil water separator and discharge oily bilge water into the sea.
• Monitoring Equipment Manipulated: Crew members later ran fresh water through the oil content monitor while discharging oily bilge water, allowing them to circumvent the ship’s pollution-control system.
• Required Records Were Inaccurate: The illegal discharges were not properly documented in the MSC Samira III’s oil record book as required by U.S. and international law.
• Four Years of Probation: Both companies were sentenced to four years of probation, while Second Engineer Mikhail Tsurikov, who previously pleaded guilty to violating APPS, is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 10.

Deep Dive

The machinery meant to keep oily waste out of the ocean was aboard the MSC Samira III. So was the monitoring equipment meant to catch a violation. When those protections became inconvenient, senior crew members found ways around them. For months, oily bilge water was moved through the ship and discharged into the sea while the records meant to account for such discharges told a different story. On Friday, the companies responsible for the vessel pleaded guilty to federal pollution charges and were sentenced to pay a combined $1.75 million fine.

MSC Shipmanagement Limited, the vessel’s operating company, and Hong Kong Spirit Shipping and Trading Limited, its owner, each pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to two counts of violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships, or APPS. The companies were also sentenced to four years of probation.

The conduct aboard the MSC Samira III stretched from June 2024 through January 2025. It was not a single illicit discharge or a momentary failure of equipment. According to the Justice Department, senior members of the ship’s engine department repeatedly directed or carried out methods for getting oily bilge water overboard while circumventing the systems designed to stop precisely that from happening.

Between June and September 2024, senior engine officers instructed lower-level crew members to use portable pumps and hoses to move oily bilge water from the vessel’s bilge holding tank into its sewage holding tank. From there, the crew discharged the waste into the sea through the sewage tank’s overboard discharge valve.

The route mattered. By sending the waste through the sewage system, the crew bypassed the ship’s oil water separator, equipment designed to prevent oily bilge water containing more than 15 parts per million of oil from being discharged into the sea.

The ship’s oil record book should have provided the paper trail. U.S. and international law require exceptional oil discharges to be recorded there. The officers responsible for the operations did not make the required entries.

By September, the method had become more elaborate. On several occasions between September 2024 and January 2025, senior members of the engine department manipulated the oil water separator itself. Instead of running oily bilge water through the equipment’s oil content monitor, they ran fresh water through the monitor while oily bilge water was discharged into the sea through the separator.

The monitor, in other words, was allowed to see the water the crew wanted it to see. Those discharges were not accurately recorded in the oil record book either.

What happened aboard the MSC Samira III illustrates a stubborn weakness in compliance systems built around machinery, monitoring and documentation: each layer can look formidable until the people entrusted with it decide that the control is something to defeat rather than obey. Here, prosecutors described both the circumvention of physical pollution controls and the failure to maintain the records that should have exposed what was happening.

That's important because APPS enforcement reaches beyond what a vessel does far out at sea. The integrity of the records presented when foreign ships enter U.S. ports is itself part of the enforcement architecture.

“Foreign vessels that enter the ports of the United States and present false documents undermine our efforts to preserve our environment and enforce the law,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division said in announcing the case. He said the department would protect the integrity of the U.S. port state control system against operators that put profit ahead of legal compliance.

U.S. Attorney David Metcalf for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania was less restrained in his description of the conduct, saying the companies “repeatedly cut corners and covered it up” and characterizing the violations as evidence of greed and disregard for U.S. law.

The Coast Guard placed the prosecution in a broader regulatory context. Capt. Roberto Rivera, captain of the port and commander of Sector Delaware Bay, said concealing illegal discharges not only threatens the marine environment but undermines the domestic and international frameworks built to protect waterways.

The criminal case has also reached an individual member of the crew. Second Engineer Mikhail Tsurikov previously pleaded guilty to violating APPS and is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 10. The MSC Samira III had an oil water separator. It had an oil content monitor. It had an oil record book. None of those controls disappeared. They were instead bypassed, manipulated or rendered unreliable by the people operating them.

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