Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  “I have to pay with cash for just about everything on this island,” he says, reaching his hand down into the bag beneath the seat and passing a wad of bills to one of his assistants, who is waiting outside the car.

  “I can’t give my people a break. Most of them are lazy, so I have to supervise them. I’m telling you. There’s no time for this shit, man. They don’t want to work hard. Sometimes I talk to them in a very tough way,” he says.

  “The owner of the Thunder isn’t stupid, you know. They looked for a port with a low profile. The plan was for the ship to remain here for three or four months of repairs, then they would find a local crew to start a new season,” Morais says.

  “I work directly with the owner. The owner sends money to the families every month and he pays for all the officers here in São Tomé,” he explains.

  “The money sometimes comes from a bank in Singapore, but we deal with José Manuel Salgueiro. He is the one giving the orders. Everything goes through him,” he says.

  José Manuel Salgueiro’s name and telephone number were found on the bridge of the Thunder just before the ship sank. The Spaniard has been an operator for a number of ships that were fishing illegally in the Southern Ocean and has a close affiliation with the Galician ship owner Florindo González and la mafia gallega.

  “I can’t go into any more detail. The owner is the owner,” Morais says.

  Wilson Morais explains that he still sends his invoices to Royal Marine & Spares, the company in Nigeria which one year before was denounced as a fraud by the authorities in the country.

  “I just do my job. Let’s finish up with this and have a beer. OK?”

  A gang of young boys who are busy polishing an old Toyota point towards the villa at the end of the street and shout: “The pirates, the pirates.”

  By the beginning of October, Wilson Morais had had enough of skyrocketing costs. He had made outlays of more than EUR 10,000 a month to cover hotel rooms for the three officers of the Thunder. He had also had difficulties having the costs reimbursed by the Thunder’s owner. On a by-way near the esplanade he found a villa for rent. The house had been the property of the military. Now it had been taken over by a speculator, was guarded by a security guard and equipped with domestic help and a swimming pool. In addition to renting the house for Cataldo and his men, he provided them with a small motorcycle so they could get around on the island.

  In the beginning the mood between the three convicted criminals was tense; Cataldo had tried to deflect the blame for the wreck onto the engineers. Sometimes Morais would drop by with a case of beer to alleviate the tensions between them.

  Now Cataldo comes walking up to the gate. He opens it slightly and tells us that he is not allowed to speak while the appeal of his case is ongoing.

  “I have pictures of Sea Shepherd that show what they really do,” he says, as if he held the trump card he never had the chance to play before somebody knocked over the table.

  Neither the Spanish nor the Chilean authorities have asked to have the prisoners extradited. Now it seems as if the three officers have been left to their own devices and the luxury prison. But Cataldo is still unflinching in his loyalty to the owner.

  “One day I’ll show you. Then I’ll tell the true story,” he says and returns to his luxury prison.

  “It’s a paradox,” Alex the interpreter says, who always has a sharp quip to make about life in São Tomé. “While the prisoners are living a life of luxury, paid for by an unknown source, through a hidden bank account, the population is struggling to survive.”

  Soon São Tomé begins behaving evasively. The telephones are silent, meetings are postponed, the director of the coast guard appears to have sunk into the ocean and the public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho is suddenly so busy that one would think a wave of banana thefts had washed over the island. Nobody seems to know where the documents, judgments and court records of the Thunder case are found. Nobody is allowed to talk, nobody answers the phone and nobody can tell when Cataldo and his men will receive their final sentence.

  On the beach by the courthouse there is a group of young people sitting with their hands around their ankles and staring out at the sea as if the incoming tide is going to bring with it a few surprises.

  “They are sitting here and waiting for the saviour. And the saviour is an NGO,” the interpreter Alex says in his customary caustic manner.

  The judge who found the three officers of the Thunder guilty and who oddly enough is also responsible for the appeal is standing outside the courthouse. At the sight of us he runs towards a car, jumps in and disappears. He stops a short distance up the street, close enough to be able to see us but far enough away to be able to take off if we should run towards the car.

  When we call him, he says that he is not allowed to speak to us.

  “The judges know their rights, but they are not as well informed about their duties,” the interpreter Alex says.

  In the city centre, the ocean air has eaten away at the old colonial buildings, rendering them porous and ramshackle; on some of them the effect has been the same as a grenade. At Café Central the owner sits playing sudoku at her regular table, something she has been doing without cease since her husband recently passed away. At his office next door, the defence attorney Pascoal Daio is working on the appeal for the officers of the Thunder.

  “Who owned the Thunder?”

  “I don’t know. This house belongs to me, but the Thunder, no, I have no idea …”

  In the evening we go to the bar Pico Mocambo, a well-maintained colonial building in a lush garden where they serve pungent, homemade rum. Suddenly a massive, frowning voodoo mask of iron falls down from the wall. A piercing shriek follows. It hits the table top and the hand of a female tourist from Portugal. Wailing, she leaves the bar with three broken fingers.

  It is “The Martyr’s Day”. Ship agent Wilson Morais loads up the car with beer and mobile phones and invites us to come north on the island to take part in the commemoration.

  “Cataldo and the two others declined the offer to come along,” he said. “They are simultaneously stressed and bored. All they do is talk about their families and surf the Internet. I asked if I could get them something to alleviate the stress, ha ha … But they always say no.”

  Along the road the eternally green wall of the jungle recedes and is replaced by a more open landscape, like a savannah. In the village of Fernão Dias what appears is a chaos of processions, local musicians and overdressed politicians crowded together around improvised stalls offering grilled fish, corn on the cob and squid. “The Martyr’s Day” is a commemoration of the Batepa massacre of 1953, the tragedy that would change São Tomé.

  It started when the colonial government formed an ambitious plan for the urbanization and modernization of São Tomé as a means of attracting more white settlers to “the province”. Soon, a rumour was spreading through the plantations that the governor wanted to use forced labour to implement his visions.

  During the first, incipient protests a policeman was hacked to death with a machete, followed by a wave of violent retaliations nourished by a growing paranoia within the colonial regime. The sale of machetes and knives was suddenly prohibited and those who fled into the jungle were followed and locked into overcrowded cells where they were forced to fetch water in defecation buckets and were fed rotten beans. Those who did not die from torture and illness were overcome by thirst, suffocation and malnutrition. In the drying rooms of the cocoa plantations prisoners were burned alive. In Fernão Dias a work camp was established where the prisoners received the task of “emptying the ocean”. They were chained together in pairs, equipped with buckets, and forced down to the water’s edge to retrieve water that they had to pour out in the sand. Those who collapsed were thrown into the ocean. More than 1,000 people are said to have been killed during the massacre, which led to a new nationalist movement a
nd later to independence for São Tomé and Príncipe.

  On the way home from the commemoration, we end up stuck in a tailback. Wilson Morais holds in the clutch and guns the engine, as if that is going to help us advance more quickly. Suddenly he steals the march on us, telling us the rumour with which we have not yet confronted him: That he is said to have killed a money changer and driven around the city with a corpse hidden in the car.

  “Has anyone told you that I’ve been in prison?” he asks. “It was a damn foolish thing I did. I learned my lesson and I don’t like talking about it.”

  Then he starts talking.

  “A friend of mine knew some Russians who were on the island. They carried out transport commissions for the UN and were going to spend a few days off bird-hunting in the jungle. But they had no weapons, so I rented a semi-automatic shotgun from some acquaintances in the military. The day I brought back the gun, a friend and I stopped out in the bush to test-shoot it. He started. After having fired off a few rounds he gave me the weapon. I thought it was empty and pulled the trigger. But there was still ammunition in it and I hit him in the chest.”

  Then he lifts his hands off the wheel and shows us how he had held the gun.

  “It was an accident, but I panicked, ran away and tried to hide. But it only took a few hours before I was arrested. It was a bloody stupid thing …”

  The friend died instantaneously, leaving behind two young children. Wilson Morais spent three years in prison. He is still paying a monthly sum to the children of the deceased, he solemnly declares.

  “Every now and then Cataldo and the Spaniards ask about the conditions in the prison. I haven’t tried to hide that I’ve been there.”

  Once back in the city, Wilson Morais invites us to a meal of grilled fish and a couple of beers at one of the outdoor restaurants found in rows beneath the breadfruit trees in the city park.

  “The Spaniards are starting to get fat,” Morais says. “Captain Cataldo goes to the gym at least, even to the discotheque. The others just sit inside, surfing and eating. I’m afraid they will lose their minds soon.”

  For the two engineers from the Thunder, Agustín Dosil Rey and Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández, it is yet another bad day. One of the 450 miserable days the two have spent together since the Thunder set out on its final voyage. On the way to the Miguel Bernardo bakery they are stopped by the police. They haven’t paid the annual vehicle tax on the small motorcycle the agent Morais acquired for them. The debt of EUR 15 million increases by a few more euros.

  When Wilson Morais introduces us to the Spanish prisoners, they make it clear beyond any doubt that they don’t want to talk. They go to the bakery every morning on the small motorcycle that looks like it is about to buckle beneath their weight.

  They are now staring silently, each in a different direction, out towards the market place, towards the row of yellow New York taxis, towards the pack of vagrant dogs scampering around in the garbage that has accumulated along the curb of the sidewalk. They sit here every day, like two forgotten old men waiting for the final judgment.

  46

  THE MAN FROM MONGOLIA

  SINGAPORE, FEBRUARY 2016

  The Thunder’s journey was concealed by layer upon layer of lies and conspiracy. The ship was assisted and protected by anonymous agents, insurance companies, banks, corrupt servants and flag states that wanted their cut of the poaching revenues. Four of “The Bandit 6” sailed under the red and blue flag of Mongolia, the most unlikely shipping nation of them all.

  “The Thunder became a huge problem,” says Tamir Lkhagvademberel, the director of the Mongolia Ship Registry.

  We meet at a luxury restaurant in Singapore. The director is a husky and smiling middle-aged man incessantly fingering his gold-plated phone. He has five employees with him who listen to the conversation in silence. They were the ones who were going to punish the Thunder’s owner and officers if they broke the law or investigate the ship if it should get into an accident. Mongolia’s Navy consists of a tugboat on a lake in the north-western part of the country. It is manned by a crew of seven, only one of whom can swim.

  “We have a bad reputation. That is something we are working hard to get rid of, but it is difficult to be removed from the black list. It will take us at least three years,” the director says between mouthfuls of lamb shank.

  For ship owners there are a number of good reasons to sail under flags of convenience like the Mongolian. It is cheap, the ship owners are spared the annoyance of public regulations, can hire inexpensive and non-union labour and avoid taxes and cumbersome environmental and safety regulations. And they don’t ask owners hiding behind shell companies in tax havens any intrusive questions.

  For somebody who runs a business which for years has been accused of hiding criminals, Tamir Lkhagvademberel seems surprisingly straightforward and naive – like his own path to the top of the Mongolian shipping industry.

  In the winter of 2008 he flew from Ulan Bator to Berlin and from there on to Oslo. He didn’t know much about the Norwegian capital, but managed to find his way to the university, where he presented his wish to become a student. Preferably within the tourism and travel industry, he said.

  The only documents he had with him were a diploma from a hotel management vocational school in Singapore and a tourist visa. After having received a polite rejection and advice to apply through ordinary channels, he travelled on to Sweden and the University of Uppsala. There too his attempts at acquiring acceptance as a student were unsuccessful.

  Back in Mongolia he gave up on his dreams of higher education and found a job in the Ministry of Transport, where eventually he was appointed ship’s registrar at the Mongolia Ship Registry – the ship registry of a country located 1,300 kilometres from the closest port. The registry was the idea of Mongolia’s Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar and was to give its clients “excellence in registry and marine services”. What he did was to rent out Mongolia’s sovereignty to a private company, allegedly to procure revenues for the country’s treasury. He appointed his daughter as head of the office. Since few ship owners wanted to travel to the edge of the Gobi Desert to register their ships, the Mongolian ship registry was based in Singapore.

  When Tamir Lkhagvademberel arrived at the ship registry’s austere offices in Singapore’s Chinatown, one of his first tasks was to register the fishing vessel the Kuko. In the registration papers, the old Vesturvon has undergone an impossible transformation: the ship was no longer built in Ulsteinvik in Norway in 1969, but rather in northern Spain 20 years later. On paper the hull is two metres shorter and five tons heavier. While the ship is registered in Mongolia, it is also listed in the Nigerian ships register under the more well-known name of the Thunder. The ship owner in Galicia had secured two sets of papers. For him it was a perfect system, while for the authorities who were trying to follow the ship’s pillaging missions in Antarctica, it was a nightmare.

  Tamir Lkhagvademberel has no reasonable explanation for how so much could go wrong at the same time.

  From the ministry in Ulan Bator, he has been told to use the meeting to create a better impression of the ship registry. A few years ago the registry’s director was caught cheating at a casino in Florida. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The country was accused of having registered anything that would float at a low cost. Mongolia-registered ships were constantly being seized or were mixed up in life-threatening or fatal accidents.

  Before Mongolia started selling its flag, the ships register of Cambodia was the preferred banner of international criminals. The register was owned by the private company Sovereign Ventures, which had close ties with North Korea. After several episodes involving ships smuggling narcotics and weapons, Cambodia was forced to shut down its register. Sovereign Ventures bought its way into the Mongolia registry instead, which was quickly suspected of hiding North Korean and Iranian ships in violation of the international san
ctions regime. Before long the Mongolian shipping escapade came to be viewed as a serious security threat.

  “Mongolia appears to have no problem renting out its flag to weapons proliferators, criminals and other shady figures who endanger the security of the United States and its allies,” Director Peter Pham wrote in an analysis for the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs.1

  “We had no experience with shipping; this was a first step towards the maritime industry. Some of the ships we registered became a headache for us. The USA and NATO pressured us to get rid of the North Korean ships and we also threw out agents who worked with blacklisted ships. We had to do something about our reputation,” Tamir Lkhagvademberel says.

  The pirate vessels’ owners paid USD 3,000 to sail under the Mongolian flag. Nonetheless, the registry’s sales volume did not exceed 1 million dollars in 2015, according to Lkhagvademberel. That is barely enough for payroll, rent and living expenses in one of the most expensive cities in the world. If they are not earning money on it, why does Mongolia have a ship registry?

  “Mongolia wants to become a shipping nation. We hope that more Mongolians will purchase their own ships in the course of the next few years,” is Lkhagvademberel’s attempted explanation.

  Under pressure from Australia, Lkhagvademberel removed the Thunder and the other fishing vessels from its registry.

  The ship registry’s financial director, the company’s only woman, is explicitly sceptical about the meeting.

  “Why are we actually sitting here and talking to you?” she asks.

  Five silent men look up from their plates and wait for an answer.

  We drive to the offices of the ship registry in Chinatown. At the office the director has an equestrian statue of Djengis Khan.

  “We once had the largest fleet in the world,” he says.

  Even by the loosest of definitions, it must be admitted that it has been a long time since Mongolia was a shipping superpower. In the thirteenth century the Mongolian fleet was wiped out by a typhoon in an attempt to invade Japan. More than 4,000 ships and 100,000 soldiers are said to have disappeared.