TEN years to the day after the Prestige tanker sent an SOS heralding one of Europe's worst oil spills, the 77-year-old Greek captain has testified at a trial in Spain that his vessel had passed the required checks.
The ill-fated tanker's skipper, Apostolos Mangouras, was the first of four accused to testify in the trial over the catastrophe in which tens of thousands of tonnes of oil blackened the coasts of Spain, Portugal and France.
Prosecutors have charged the captain with criminal damage of the environment and a protected nature reserve and are seeking a combined jail term of 12 years.
They are also demanding more than 4 billion euros ($A4.91 billion) in damages.
"We had made visual inspections" of the hull and ballast tanks before it departed Saint Petersburg," said the captain on Tuesday, explaining that the checks were repeated every three or six months.
Mangouras, testifying in the trial at an exhibition centre in the northern port city of A Coruna, said he and his Philippine crew were all properly qualified for their duties.
The Prestige, a Bahama-flagged Liberian tanker, was carrying 77,000 tonnes of fuel when it sent a distress call in the midst of a storm off the northwestern Spanish coast on November 13, 2002.
The conservative Popular Party government in power at the time ordered the Prestige out to sea away from the Spanish coast instead of following an emergency contingency plan prepared by experts that called for it to be brought to port where the leaking oil could be confined.
For six days it drifted in the Atlantic, before breaking up and foundering 250 kilometres (155 miles) off the coast into waters some 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) deep, oozing some 50,000 tonnes of thick, sticky oil into the ocean and coastline.
Over the weeks that followed 300,000 volunteers from Spain and the rest of Europe joined local people in scraping the oil from the rocks and beaches, armed with little more than buckets and their bare hands.
Others charged are Greek chief engineer Nikolaos Argyropoulos and first mate Irineo Maloto, a Filipino whose whereabouts are unknown, and Jose Luis Lopez-Sors, head of the Spanish merchant navy at the time, who ordered the ship out to sea when it was losing fuel.
The trial is due to last until May and hear testimony from 133 witnesses and 100 experts.
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