45 years in prison and €1.82 billion in fines for the Simione vessel case in Vigo
The Pontevedra court sentences those responsible for transporting nearly three tonnes of cocaine from Africa with exemplary penalties.
45 years in prison and €1.82 billion in fines for the Simione vessel case in Vigo
A Galician court has imposed one of the harshest sentences in recent years for maritime drug trafficking. The Provincial Court of Pontevedra has sanctioned five people linked to the vessel Simione, which transported cocaine from the Atlantic to Spanish coasts. The sum of the sentences reaches forty-five years in prison and fines exceed 1.8 billion euros.
The mastermind of the operation, owner and manager of the vessel, must serve twelve years in custody and pay 600 million euros. The judges attribute to him the complete planning of the voyage, which departed from Angola in November 2022. The man hired the crew, oversaw each stage of the journey through daily telephone contact and travelled to Senegal to prepare the ship's logistics before it collected the merchandise.
The three sailors on board have also been found guilty. Two were given sentences of ten and nine and a half years respectively, along with individual fines of 500 million euros. The third received a reduction for late confession: seven and a half years and 220 million euros in financial penalties.
The drugs were seized on 18 December 2022. These consisted of 115 bundles with 2,949 packages totalling 2,866.52 kilogrammes of cocaine at 77.3 per cent purity. Its street value was around 106 million euros. The merchandise was loaded at sea, southeast of Cape Verde, from an unidentified vessel.
A fifth defendant, linked to distribution on land, was also punished for storing and selling narcotics in quantities of notorious importance. He himself acknowledged his role in the illicit chain.
The ruling emphasises that the operation far exceeds the limits of notorious importance and that the use of a ship aggravated the conduct by facilitating transfer and making detection more difficult. The defence teams had questioned the validity of the evidence, but the court rejected those arguments. The ruling is not yet final and can be appealed to higher courts.
Information from VigoÉ
Source: Google News ES — Crime (es)