Zavaleta Salas finds this to be a demented claim. The Tiantai is now lying at a depth of 5,000–6,000 metres, and in another position from the one they will report to the insurance company. Nobody will ever find the ship.
Two days later they throw the emergency beacon overboard and then set their course for Malaysia. When they approach land barely a month later, Alberto Zavaleta Salas has the chance to see the maritime declaration for the first time. He knows very well what happened, but he and the officers are ordered to learn the story that is written down there by heart. Everyone has to tell the same story, the Spaniard whom the ship owner sent to lead the operation repeats.
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
