A Hong Kong ship management company told a federal judge in San Francisco today it wants to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges stemming from a 53,000-gallon oil spill from a container ship into the San Francisco Bay in 2007.
Fleet Management Ltd. asked U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in a court filing to allow it to plead guilty to charges of negligently polluting the Bay and killing migratory birds during the spill from the Cosco Busan on Nov. 7, 2007.
The two misdemeanor counts carry a possible maximum fine of $215,000 as well as a possible order for restitution, according to the filing.
Fleet Management still faces six other felony counts of making false statements and obstructing justice by allegedly falsifying transit documents after the accident.
The company is due to go on trial in Illston’s court on Sept. 14 on those counts, which carry fines of up to $500,000 upon conviction.
Fleet Management’s lawyer, Marc Greenberg, and U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Jack Gillund declined to comment on whether any plea agreement was in the works for the remaining felony counts.
No date has been set for the proposed guilty plea to the two misdemeanor counts.
Fleet Management was the operator of the Cosco Busan, with responsibility for hiring and supervising the crew, at the time of the accident.
The ship, en route from the Port of Oakland to South Korea, spilled more than 53,000 gallons of heavy bunk fuel into the Bay when it hit a protective fender of the Bay Bridge in heavy fog.
The oil killed birds, fouled beaches and disrupted the fishing industry. Cleanup costs have been estimated at more than $70 million.
The ship’s pilot, John Cota, 61, of Petaluma, was charged with the same misdemeanor counts and pleaded guilty to those charges in March. He is to be sentenced by Illston on June 19 and could face between two and 10 months in jail.
Prosecutors agreed to drop two additional counts in which Cota was charged with making false statements about his medications and medical conditions on pilot medical forms.
Fleet Management last year asked Illston for permission to plead no contest to the charges it faces, but the judge refused, saying that the “in a case such as this, the public has a substantial interest in a final determination of fault.”
In a no-contest plea, a defendant does not admit guilt, but accepts liability for the criminal sentence or fines that would result from a conviction. The no-contest plea cannot be used as evidence in a civil lawsuit, however.
Fleet Management, Cota and the ship’s owner, Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong, face several civil lawsuits filed by fishermen and federal, state and local governments. Those cases are pending before a different federal judge in San Francisco.
In today’s filing, Fleet Management said it is prepared to admit that “it is in fact guilty of the (misdemeanor) offenses” because the ship’s captain failed to review Cota’s intended route in advance and failed to overrule commands by Cota that led to the crash.
Fleet Management said it believes there were multiple causes of the accident but said it acknowledges that negligence by the captain was one of them.
The filing said the company’s board of directors approved the application for the guilty plea at a meeting in Hong Kong on Friday.
Copyright © 2009 by Bay City News, Inc. "… republication, re-transmission or reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
