A vessel operating company has pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to charges stemming from the discharge of oily waste into the sea.

MSC Shipmanagement Limited, one of the largest shipping companies in the world, pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) for conduct that occurred on the motor vessel MSC Samira III between June 2024 and January 2025.

The vessel’s owner, Hong Kong Spirit Shipping and Trading Limited, also pleaded guilty to two counts of violating APPS.

Both companies were sentenced to pay a combined fine of $1.75 million and serve four years of probation. Second Engineer Mikhail Tsurikov previously pleaded guilty to violating APPS and is scheduled to be sentenced on September 10.

“Foreign vessels that enter the ports of the United States and present false documents undermine our efforts to preserve our environment and enforce the law,” said principal deputy assistant attorney general Adam Gustafson of the Energy and Natural Resources Division. “We will vigorously protect the integrity of our port state control system against actors who put profit over compliance with the law.”

Between June and September 2024, senior officers in the engine department of the MSC Samira III instructed lower-level crew members to pump oily bilge water from the vessel’s bilge holding tank to the sewage holding tank using portable pumps and hoses.

The crew members then discharged the oily bilge water into the sea using the sewage holding tank’s overboard discharge valve. In doing so, they bypassed the oil water separator, a piece of pollution prevention equipment designed to prevent the discharge of oily bilge water containing more than 15 parts per million of oil into the sea.

U.S. and international law requires that such exceptional discharges of oil be recorded in a ship’s oil record book, but the officers in charge of these operations failed to do so.

In addition to these discharges of oily waste from the vessel’s sewage holding tank, on several occasions between September 2024 and January 2025, senior engine department crew members also tricked the oil water separator by running fresh water instead of oily bilge water through the equipment’s oil content monitor.

Doing so allowed them to discharge oily bilge water directly into the sea through the oil water separator. These discharges were also not accurately recorded in the vessel’s oil record book as required by law.

In January 2025, the MSC Samira III made two separate calls in the Port of Philadelphia, where its crew presented the false oil record book to the U.S. Coast Guard.