Russian ship captain guilty of killing crew member in crash with tanker in North Sea

A Russian captain has been found guilty of killing a crew member when his ship crashed into an oil tanker off the coast of East Yorkshire.

Vladimir Motin, 59, was on sole watch duty in March last year when the oil tanker, Solong, collided with the anchored Stena Immaculate near the Humber Estuary.

The resulting fire instantly killed Solong crew member Mark Angelo Pernia, 38.

The Filipino victim had a five-year-old child never met his second kid, who was born two months after his death.

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It took a jury at the Old Bailey eight hours to find Motin, 59, from St Petersburg, guilty of his manslaughter by gross negligence.

Detective Chief Superintendent Craig Nicholson told the Press Association is was a ‘simple, senseless tragedy’.

He said: ‘It’s a miracle that there weren’t more fatalities or serious injuries.

‘Similarly, this could have been a huge environmental catastrophe. The Solong burned for eight days following the collision.

‘There were people on the deck of the Stena Immaculate at the point of impact. One crew member was up a mast changing a light fitting.’

The Rotterdam-bound Solong, which was 130 metres long, departed Grangemouth in Scotland at 9.05pm on March 9.

Soloing’s 14 crew members were tasked with carrying alcoholic spirits and some hazardous substances, including empty sodium cyanide containers.

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The Stena Immaculate was 183.2 metres long and was transporting 220,000 barrels of JetA1 high-grade aviation fuel from Greece to the UK.

The two vessels crashed on March 10, causing the Stena Immaculate’s aviation fuel to leak, sparking a fire that spread to both ships.

It was alleged during the trial that Motin was responsible for multiple failures in the lead-up to the disaster and then lied about what took place on the bridge.

The Russian captain did ‘absolutely nothing’ to stop his container ship crashing into a US oil tanker despite being on an ‘obvious collision course’ for more than half an hour, the court previously heard. 

Motin had a ‘constellation of information’ telling him he needed to act but did the opposite and failed to avert the collision, jurors were told.

He failed to summon help, slow down, sound the alarm or instigate a crash stop as a last resort, the prosecution added.

Jurors heard a long silence from the bridge of the Solong before it crashed, and a full minute elapsed before Motin was heard to react to the collision.

The captain and his remaining crew were brought ashore in Grimsby, where Motin messaged his wife saying he would be ‘guilty’.

In his defence, Motin denied manslaughter and rejected suggestions he had been asleep or left his post on the bridge.

He told jurors he made a ‘mistake’ and perssed the wrong button when he tried to take the Solong out of autopilot from one nautical mile away.

However he did not realise the error and proceeded to stop and restart the steering gear to no effect, the court heard.

Motin said he decided against a crash stop because he feared the Solong would collide with the accommodation block, killing the American tanker crew.

The prosecution alleged that Motion gave differing accounts of the crash to police and to jurors and lied about what happened to ‘get back to his wife’ in Russia.

Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker had told jurors: ‘It would have been blindingly obvious to him that he had pressed the wrong button, and how to rectify it if that is what happened.

‘The reality is that he did nothing to avoid collision. Instead he launched into a problem that had never occurred on the Solong.

‘There were no mechanical or electronic difficulties on the Solong. The rudder was working. The only thing that was not working on March 10 2025 was the man in the dock.’