by Eskil Engdal
When they get to Malaysia, Zavaleta Salas is nervous, but he sticks to the script.
Two years later, the Peruvian shipmaster tells what he holds to be the true story of the wreck of the Tiantai, in hopes that the Guardia Civil can help him file suit against the Vidal family so he can collect the money he is owed. He also hopes that he can make a few bucks on the story. He is disappointed.
For investigator Miguel and the Guardia Civil, the wreck of the Tiantai is already a part of the case against the Vidal family and 12 of their trusted directors, fishing captains and engineers, but Miguel is investigating the ship and the wreck as a part of a large money laundering operation. The Tiantai was bought with money the ship owners had earned on illegal fishing. The money was subsequently laundered, first through the purchase of the Tiantai, subsequently through the insurance settlement, and then once more when the ship owners bought two new ships for the insurance money and one final time when yet another ship sank under suspicious circumstances.
On 23 September 2015, the fishing vessel the Txori Urdin went down on a clear, pleasant day off the coast of the little island state of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, not far from the final resting place of the Thunder.
There were no Sea Shepherd cameras that documented what happened when the Txori Urdin disappeared, but the explanation given by the captain and the officers is a veritable repetition of the explanation following the wreck of the Thunder a few months before.
“They heard a big boom. They didn’t see anything that could have caused it, but they think it was a container,” was the statement of one of the investigators who made inquiries into the wreck of the Txori Urdin.
While the captain and the two engineers on the Thunder were sentenced to pay EUR 15 million in damages to São Tomé and Príncipe, the crew of the Txori Urdin were picked up by a French ship and transported to the Ivory Coast. There they had to make statements to the local police, and then they were allowed to travel home.
The insurance payment of EUR 2.325 million is now in a bank account in Spain. The Spanish authorities have frozen the assets through an attachment order. If they win the case against the Vidal family, they will seize the money.
Miguel and the Guardia Civil don’t need Alberto Zavaleta Salas’ story to prove the money laundering. And when Zavaleta Salas tries to sell the story and his documentation to the Tiantai’s German insurance company Allianz, he runs into yet another closed door.
Allianz does not want to attract any more attention to the case. The insurance company sold insurance to a ship that was blacklisted, a ship in a fleet of the most notorious pirate shipping companies in Galicia, the shipping company that is now under investigation in the largest police operation ever against illegal fishing in Spain. It is a case that Allianz does not want to be associated with.
The ill-fated Alberto Zavaleta Salas waited too long to tell his story.
50
A DIRTY BUSINESS
HOBART, JUNE 2016
The Thunder lies shrouded in the darkness of 3,000-metre depths, colonized by micro-organisms, algae and rust-eating bacteria that are slowly consuming the hull. Interpol and Sea Shepherd call the ship’s demise and final sentencing in São Tomé a breakthrough in the battle against fisheries crime.1
“The chase of the Thunder showed that there are millions of square miles of ocean that are unregulated and that you have unscrupulous people who are chasing the money,” US Secretary of State John Kerry stated at a conference in Chile.2
Fourteen months after the sinking of the ship the owner of the Thunder has still not been punished.
Hobart. It was here the search for the Thunder began.
The rain is hammering down on Tasmania’s capital on this June evening. That is perhaps why the city seems desolate and forsaken. Its neat rows of Georgian stone houses give it a touch of an English village’s calm complacency. The old storage houses on the harbour are a reminder of the time when the city equipped whaling expeditions to the Antarctic. There are no guests at the Hadleys Hotel bar, but Roald Amundsen’s portrait stares down from the wall.
In March 1912 Amundsen came here and was given a “miserable little room under the stairway”. He felt that he was treated like a vagabond. The next day he walked over to the post office and sent a telegraph reporting the news of his conquest of the South Pole to King Haakon of Norway. Near one of the piers extending like fingertips out into the Derwent River, the Norwegian polar explorer Carsten Borchgrevink set out on his Southern Cross expedition, the first to spend the winter in the Antarctic.
Soon the former penal colony was the most important depot for Antarctica. The Secretariat of CCAMLR, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, is located in an old schoolhouse in Hobart.
“This is a dirty business and we must continue to hunt down these bastards until each and every one of them is in prison and all their ships are lying at the bottom of the sea.”
Professor Denzil Miller is called an Antarctic legend. He has led 15 scientific expeditions to the continent, and for eight years he was the Executive Secretary of CCAMLR.
“This is not about catching some fish. It is world-wide, organized crime. If we are going to stop them, we must be far more serious about following the money trail, where the money goes and what it is spent on. I have suggested that we establish ‘red cells’ with our own intelligence officers who operate completely under the radar and outside the system and who have the freedom to access tax registries and bank accounts. When it comes to crime as sophisticated as this, personal liberty does not exist. We must clean up one area at a time, chase them from place to place, stop them, harass them and investigate them. The ship owners all operate according to a simple principle: the possibility of being caught and punished is so small that it’s worth the risk. And usually you can buy your way out of the problems,” Miller says.
“There’s no difference between stealing somebody’s food and killing them. The consequence is the same, it’s just a different kind of action. With one you kill a little more slowly than the other. There is therefore no reason to respect Vidal and the other ship owners as risk-takers. They are bandits. Illegal fishing is a way of breaking down moral and social structures. At the same time, it discloses people’s unfathomable greed.”
After a toothfish poaching vessel sank off the coast of South Georgia with 17 casualties, the autopsy report showed that most of the crew were either HIV-positive or had hepatitis.
“They were the poorest of the poor. A few years later the casualties from the wreck of the Amur were dumped on land near a landfill in Mauritius. That shows what kind of people are behind these operations,” Miller says.
When the pirate skip the Amur sailed out of port in Montevideo in September 2000, it already had a death sentence. The ship was in terrible shape, the crew barely had any experience as fishermen. Off the coast of the Kerguelen Islands the ship sailed into a violent storm, two waves broke over the ship, and seconds later it was being tossed around in the breakers, listing perilously. The fishing gear blocked the evacuation routes, there were no fire extinguishers on board and the crew fought to make their way to life rafts which never opened. At first the ships in the area did not respond to the distress signals. When the disaster was a fact and a vessel came to their rescue, 14 of the Amur’s crew had drowned or frozen to death. The survivors and the deceased were taken on board an illegal, Russian-registered vessel. The corpses were put in the cold storage room together with the toothfish. In Mauritius both the dead bodies and those of the crew who were ambulatory, were dumped on land without papers or explanation. The ship owner later told the next of kin that they were not entitled to any compensation, in that there were neither insurance policies nor proper employment contracts.
In the years from 1996 to 2003, as many as ten ships are believed to have disappeared on their way to the Southern Ocean. They were f
loating coffins which seldom incurred large losses for the ship owners if they were taken down by the breakers in the Antarctic. Or by the authorities. Any crew members who were arrested were abandoned and forgotten by the ship owners.
After the Uruguay-flagged pirate ship the Maya V was boarded and escorted to Australia with 200 tons of toothfish in the cold storage room, the crew were let off following the payment of an insignificant fine. But the shipmaster and the fishing captain stood trial. The 71-year-old shipmaster stated that he had had two heart surgeries, had a helpless and mentally ill son at home in Uruguay and only 20,000 dollars in his retirement fund. During the time he spent in prison, the Spanish fishing captain started showing signs of clinical depression and paranoia.
Instead of paying the bail for the shipmaster and the fishing captain, the ship owners lent out the money at 7 per cent interest. Also the Chilean crew felt that they’d been left holding the bag. They had to pay fines and airline tickets out of their own pocket and at home in Chile they brought charges against the company that recruited them, the fisheries company Pesca Cisne in Punta Arenas. The company was controlled by the González family of the tiny city of O Carballiño in the Spanish province of Galicia.3
“The Spanish operators could basically be described as downright cruel.”
The environmentalist Alistar Graham pronounced this judgement almost 20 years ago. Long before Interpol became involved in the search for the fishing pirates, Graham ran his own intelligence operation to find the owners behind the illegal toothfish vessels. From Hobart he operated the organization Isofish, the foremost objective of which was to expose companies and individuals who made their fortunes on “the white gold”. It all started when Graham, with his irrepressible chuckle and indubitable talent for raising hell, picked up on a rumour claiming that there was a fleet of illegal toothfish poaching vessels in Mauritius. In exchange for a substantial amount of money, an open bar and a rural hiding place he sent an acquaintance to Mauritius to spy on and infiltrate the pirate fleet. After having exposed the pirate toothfish fleet in Mauritius he continued to follow the trail all the way to Galicia.
“The ships are just steel. Every morning there was somebody who jumped out of bed and decided what the ships should do. They were the ones we were going to find,” Graham says from his “office” in Hobart, the pub and restaurant of the New Sydney Hotel.
Graham had developed a sly technique for extracting the truth about the illegal fishermen. He knew that he was confronting large men who carried out difficult jobs in dangerous waters and who were away from home for long periods of time. Nonetheless he wanted to send them a message: I know where you are, where you live and what you are doing.
When Graham travelled to Galicia in the end of the 1990s, he took contact with the local newspapers and provided them with information about the fish poachers and his stories about them were circulated in the local community. Then he applied pressure on the stay-at-home wives, probed and asked questions about what their husbands were actually doing. At first a hellish commotion ensued, but little by little the wives and mothers started to talk. And some of the ship owners.
“One of the ship owners told me how he had learned the business from his father and that his eight-year-old son would take over the business. He was working from a modest office in Vigo. From there he could organize fishing operations all over the world. They were not concerned about whether they were fishing legally or illegally. They just went out and did it.”
“It was a hard game and no place for losers,” Graham states today.4
In the course of a few days everyone in Vigo, Galicia’s largest city and Europe’s largest fishing port, knew there was a stranger sniffing around in the city.
“One morning while I was eating breakfast at the hotel in Vigo, all of a sudden two bloody enormous guys appeared beside my table. They wanted to know what I was up to. I looked up at them and thought: I’ll never survive this. It was Florindo González and his brother,” Graham says.
It was the same Florindo González who was sued by the unhappy crew of the Maya V. And the same person the Spanish private detective “Luis” had identified as the owner of the Thunder.
The correspondence with the secret informants who spied on the pirate fleet for many years is in the files of COLTO – the coalition of legal toothfish operators. In an email from 2004 two men are listed as the two largest poachers in the Southern Ocean: Antonio Vidal Suárez and Florindo González.
“The main thing has been to get the interest and focus of Australian, US and Spanish authorities on catching ‘Mr Big’ of IUU-fishing, rather than focusing on the smaller people involved … What I want to ensure is that Vidal, and González do not get away with all their actions, which have made them millionaires over recent years.”
Twelve years after the letter was written, “Mr Big” is still at large.
51
THE SHOWDOWN
VIGO, OCTOBER 2016
He arrives at the agreed upon hour, leaves his all-weather jacket on the chair, stands by the window and looks out at the clouds drifting towards the city. For two days he has been talking about his life as a fisherman in the Southern Ocean. And about life on board the Thunder. We have agreed that the location of the meeting is to be kept secret.
“What are we going to talk about today?” he asks.
“The owner of the Thunder.”
At first he stalls and says that will cost us more. Then he starts to tell us about the man for whom he has worked for many years, and whom he calls simply “Floro”. The businessman Florindo González Corral from Galicia.
“The first ship he made a lot of money on was the Odin; on one of the trips to the Antarctic we brought in 480 tons of toothfish. With the profits from that fishing expedition he bought the Thunder. He has had at least five vessels. Sea Shepherd says that the Thunder has earned EUR 60 million, but it’s much more than that,” he begins.
“Florindo came to Singapore when we set out on the last trip. The luggage of one of the officers had been lost on the flight and Florindo paid for new clothes before we sailed south. He hired the Indonesian crew through a crewing agency in Jakarta, he just called and said: Send me 30 seamen. He treated them well and always brought them cigars when he met us at the quay. And he was also very concerned about the quality of the fish. ‘You know how I want it,’ he used to say to the head of the fish factory.”
“Every day at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, central European time, Florino or his right-hand man José Manuel Salgueiro, called the Thunder. When we were in the ice he said we had to make our way to international waters. He told us that the officers of the Thunder should be especially observant and post two watchstanders when they rounded the Cape of Good Hope. One day Captain Cataldo was instructed to turn the Thunder around and attack the Bob Barker. Then one of the officers exploded and screamed: ‘Floro can damn well come down here to crash with that damn Sea Shepherd ship himself, if that’s what he wants.’ Over the phone he often discussed which opportunities we had to get away and we talked about Angola, Papua New Guinea and Europe. But we didn’t have enough fuel to make it all the way to Europe. At one point these conversations came to an end or were just between him and Cataldo,” the seaman says.
“When they finally let us depart from São Tomé, we flew to Lisbon to be interviewed by the insurance company. Florindo, his brother and assistant showed up outside the hotel. They gave us instructions on what we should and shouldn’t say. That we must not mention toothfish and that the vessel was owned by a Singapore company. The majority did as they were told,” he says.
During the chaotic days following the wreck of the Thunder, an insurance claim arrived for more than EUR 7 million. For many years the Thunder was insured by the company British Marine. After the search for the Thunder made the international news, the Thunder and several of the other “Bandit 6” ships disappeared from the portfol
io of the long-established company. In spite of the Interpol notice status and a history as a poacher of fish, the Spanish company Mutua Marítima de Seguros (Murimar) accepted the commission of insuring the Thunder. Now Murimar had received an indemnity claim for a ship that had probably been sunk intentionally and containing illegal cargo. The claim was sent from the company Estelares in the tax haven of Panama.
Estelares appears for the first time in the Thunder saga when the ship was registered in the small African nation of Togo in 2006 and as owner when the vessel was registered in Mongolia in November 2010. But who is behind Estelares? In the company documents from Panama three people were listed as chairman of the board, board member and secretary, respectively, in the company. Two of them work for a law firm in Panama.
“Although we help out establishing companies in Panama, we are in no way involved in operations or the business management of these companies. We are just involved in the registration and the companies’ compliance with the laws regulating company registration in Panama,” the company’s board member, the lawyer Iria Barrancos Domingo says, who is also the president of Panama’s maritime bar association.
She refuses to answer questions about who owns Estelares. The Thunder’s journey into the abyss was protected by a bulwark of lawyers, brokers and institutions that chose to close their eyes to the fact that they earned money on the looting of the Antarctic.
A few blocks from Plaça Catalunya in the city centre of Barcelona, Vicente Burgal operates the detective agency Global Risk Overseas. In addition to having solid expertise in the disclosure of both unfaithful servants and unfaithful husbands, the company has also investigated several suspicious shipwrecks in the Southern Ocean. Before the insurance company pays out millions to the secret owners of the Thunder, they want to try to get to the bottom of what actually happened to the ship. The job is assigned to Vicente Burgal.