A Maltese shipping company and its British insurer have been ordered to pay compensation of about 17 million yuan (US$2.1 million) to thousands of fishermen in north China's Tianjin Municipality and Hebei Province.
The Tianjin Maritime Court has pronounced the verdict as part of the result of a series of lawsuits over an oil spill that occurred after the Maltese oil tanker Tasman Sea and a Chinese vessel collided in the Bohai Sea near Tianjin in November 2002, China Daily reported Tuesday.
The cases were filed in 2002 by the Tianjin Oceanic Bureau, the Tianjin fishing supervision and management office, three fishermen 's associations including one from the Luannan County, north China 's Hebei Province, and two from Tianjin's Tanggu District, as well as fishermen from Tianjin's Hangu region.
Demands for compensation total 170 million yuan, according to an earlier report of the China Environment News.
The defendants, the Infinity Shipping Co, Ltd and the London Steam Ship Owners' Mutual Insurance Association Ltd, as well as their attorney, could not be reached for comment on Monday, said China Daily.
According to the Tianjin newspaper Metro Express, verdicts in lawsuits filed by the two Tianjin government bodies, who claim the spill caused damage to the ocean ecology and fishing resources, will come out soon.
China Daily quoted Jiang Jingye, an attorney for the Dagu and Beitang fishermen's associations from Tanggu District of Tianjin, as saying that the compensation to his clients is only 1.7 million yuan, which is far less than the original demand of more than 8 million yuan.
Whether or not his clients will appeal to the court remains unknown, he said, adding that only after both the plaintiffs and the defendants show no objection to the verdict can the local fishermen receive the compensation.
According to the China Environment News report, the Tianjin oceanic bureau's compensation claim is the first one in China made for the ocean environment.
The bureau asked for more than 94 million yuan from the defendants, because a local monitoring center had said the oil spill had caused great damage to the maritime environment there, the report said.
However, Liu Zuoming, attorney of the Infinity Shipping Company Ltd, was quoted as saying that although the company does not object to paying compensation, the amount must be calculated correctly.
He told China Environment News that according to a report prepared by some experts from the Ocean University of China, the damages are not as severe as described by the plaintiffs.