A Maltese shipping company and its British insurer have been ordered to pay compensation of about 17 million yuan (US$2.1 million) to thousands of fishermen in north China's Tianjin Municipality and Hebei Province, the Tianjin Daily reported Monday.

The Tianjin Maritime Court pronounced the verdict on Friday in the most recent of a series of lawsuits over an oil spill that occurred after the Maltese oil tanker Tasman Sea and a Chinese vessel collided in the Bohai Sea near Tianjin in November 2002.

The cases were filed that year by the Tianjin Oceanic Bureau, the Tianjin Fishing Supervision and Management Office, three fishermen's associations including one from Luannan County, Hebei Province, and two from Tianjin's Tanggu District, as well as fishermen from Tianjin's Hangu region.

Demands for compensation totaled 170 million yuan (US$20.5 million), according to an earlier report of China Environment News in June.

The defendants, the Infinity Shipping Company and London Steam Ship Owners' Mutual Insurance Association, and their attorney could not be reached for comment yesterday.

According to yesterday’s Metro Express, a Tianjin newspaper, verdicts in lawsuits filed by the two Tianjin government bodies, which claim the spill caused damage to the ocean ecology and fishing resources, will also come out soon.

Jiang Jingye, an attorney for the Dagu and Beitang fishermen's associations from Tanggu District, said the compensation to his clients is only 1.7 million yuan (US$205,000), which is far less than the original demand of more than 8 million yuan (US$967,000).

But he told China Daily whether or not his clients will appeal remains unknown.

He added only after both the plaintiffs and the defendants show no objection to the verdict can the local fishermen receive the compensation.

According to the China Environment News report, the Tianjin Oceanic Bureau's compensation claim is the first one in China made for the ocean environment.

The bureau asked for more than 94 million yuan (US$11.3 million) from the defendants, the report said.

It added that a local monitoring center had said the oil spill had caused great damage to the marine environment there.

However, Liu Zuoming, attorney of the Infinity Shipping Company, was quoted as saying that although the company does not object to paying compensation, the amount must be calculated correctly.

He told China Environment News that, according to a report prepared by some experts from the Ocean University of China, the damages were not as severe as described by the plaintiffs. 

(China Daily December 28, 2004)