Chief Engineer of Ship Sentenced in a Federal Court in Louisiana for Discharging Oily Waste and Obstructing an Investigation

New Orleans, Louisiana / Washington, D.C. – On August 31, 2022, Kirill Kompaniets, the Chief Engineer of a foreign-flagged vessel, was sentenced in a federal court in Louisiana to prison for deliberately discharging approximately 10,000 gallons of oil-contaminated bilge water overboard in U.S. waters off the coast of New Orleans, Louisiana last year, and obstructing justice. A crew member first reported the illegal behavior to the Coast Guard over social media. Kompaniets was sentenced to a year and a day in jail, a $5,000 fine, a $200 special assessment, and six months of supervised release by the Honorable Nannette Jolivette Brown.

Engine room flooding was caused by repair operations to resolve a fault with the outflow of clean ballast water. After the leak was stopped, Chief Engineer Kompanietes and a subordinate engineer dumped the oily bilge water overboard while the ship was anchored off the coast of Louisiana near the Southwest Passage. The required pollution prevention systems for the ship, an oily-water separator and an oil content monitor, were not used, and the discharge was not recorded in the Oil Record Book, a required ship log.

Kompaniets was also charged with obstruction of justice based on various efforts to conceal the illegal discharge. In a joint factual statement filed in Court with his guilty plea, Kompaniets admitted to the following acts of obstruction of justice:

(1) making false statements to the Coast Guard that concealed the cause and nature of a hazardous condition, and concealing that the engine room of the vessel had flooded and that oil-contaminated bilge water had been discharged overboard;

(2) destroying the computer alarm printouts for the period of the illegal discharge that were sought by the Coast Guard;

(3) holding meetings with subordinate crew members and directing them to make false statements to the Coast Guard;

(4) making a false Oil Record Book that failed to disclose the illegal discharge; (5) directing subordinate engine room employees to delete all evidence from their cell phones in anticipation of the Coast Guard inspection; and (6) preparing a retaliatory document accusing the whistleblower of poor performance as part of an effort to discredit him.

“The intentional pollution of U.S. waters and the deliberate cover-up are serious criminal offenses that will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “Prosecutions such as this one should send a clear message to those that would violate the law and endanger our precious natural resources.”

“The defendant in this case deliberately disregarded procedures designed to protect the environment from contaminants and then attempted to hide his actions,” said U.S. Attorney Duane A. Evans for the Eastern District of Louisiana. “Today’s announcement emphasizes that both our office and our federal partners are committed to holding accountable all parties whose criminality jeopardizes our environment and places the public and the ecosystem at risk.”

The criminal prosecution is being handled by Assistant United States Attorney G. Dall Kammer for the Eastern District of Louisiana and Senior Litigation Counsel Richard A. Udell of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Environmental Crimes Section, with assistance from the United States Coast Guard’s District 8 and the Coast Guard Criminal Investigative Service. The probe is still ongoing.