According to unofficial information, inspection of the ship that is not finished yet and reviewing the documents of Adriatic shipyard Bijela showed that there couldn’t be any filling of the ballast tanks because former employees of this company previously took 11 caps from the ship, without the knowledge of the captain Mario Giusepe DiMeglio. Source of Vikend newspaper said that former employees dismantled and took the caps on the first day the ship entered the dry dock, on 29th of June at 16:40 o’ clock.
Five days ago media published the information that 200 former employees of the Shipyard prevented the sinking of the Italian ship and the dock which it was attached to, but also an ecological catastrophe because there is between 300 and 400 tons of oil on South River. Workers then claimed that in night between Sunday and Monday somebody came and closed the hatches on tanks and filled them with 10.000 litres of water, and that they suspect that the crew of the ship is behind this, which wanted to put additional pressure on them by this to stop their strike and finish the job so that they could leave Bijela as soon as possible.
Although inspection is still ongoing, insolvency manager of the Shipyard Zarko Ostojic was ordered to retrieve the caps that were alienated by the workers, and captain of the ship to give a written statement whether he as a person in charge gave the order to fill the ballast tanks, and whether he acquired the caps himself. Police investigators from Herceg Novi were ordered to find the aforementioned caps that were taken off the ship, and whose whereabouts are unknown to both management of the Shipyard and the captain of the ship.
Source of Vikend newspaper also said that safety of the ship South River and dock number six of the shipyard Bijela are seriously endangered, and that it is expected that circumstances under which an ecological catastrophe almost happened must be discovered and that Ministry of transport and maritime affairs also needs to be involved in order to examine technical functionality of the dock.
