YOU may remember the Prestige, the tanker that sank off the Spanish coast in 2002. Some 80,000 tonnes of noxious fuel as thick as treacle seeped out of the vessel, fouling hundreds of kilometres of Spanish and French beaches, and creating Europe’s worst environmental disaster.

What you may not know is that the Greek captain of the Prestige, 69-year-old Apostolos Mangouras, remains detained in Spain, under investigation some 15 months after the incident.

There is no sign of a trial. After three months in a Spanish jail and payment by the London P&I Club of a record €3 million (£1.99 million) bail, his incarceration was reduced to house arrest. With his passport confiscated, he remains confined to a flat in Spain and required to report daily to the police. Despite pleas for his freedom from the Greek Government, shipping organisations and European parliamentarians, Spain is determined to punish the Greek captain.

To the Spanish prosecutors, Mangouras is a villain, responsible for an economic disaster in Galicia, an impoverished Spanish province dependent on tourism and fishing. However, it is the Spanish authorities that are mainly to blame for the scale of the pollution. After months of investigation, there is little doubt that the Prestige broke apart because it was refused access to a port when it got into trouble.

When Mangouras signalled to the control tower at Cape Finisterre that his vessel was taking in water, it was his first SOS for 32 years as a ship’s master. In a force 10 gale and with 25ft waves crashing over the bows, he stayed on the Prestige with two others after the rest of the crew was evacuated, trying to secure a tow-rope to a tug.

The Spanish authorities say he refused to obey instructions, a charge Mangouras denies, but the main argument is over the port authorities’ refusal to let the Prestige into a Spanish port to unload the cargo. The port would not risk a pollution incident, but an investigation by the European Parliament concluded that it was the decision to tow the ship into the storm in the Bay of Biscay where it was battered to bits that spread the pollution over such a wide area.

Mangouras has been treated shabbily, if not scandalously by a Government desperate to shift blame. In the initial confusion, the Spanish authorities even leaked a story to the press that the elderly captain had no master’s certificate, an allegation that was later admitted to be untrue. Since the Prestige incident there has been the usual flurry of EU legislation, including the prohibition of single-hulled tankers and directives over the procedures governing safe havens.

But little has changed in Spain. This week the International Salvage Union protested about a Spanish decree requiring vessels in distress to post a €415 million bond before they would be allowed into a port of refuge.

Having gambled and lost with the Prestige, Spain wants to throw the die again. In practice, the demand for such a financial guarantee is equivalent to closing all Spanish ports to distressed vessels. Take the Prestige, a vessel built in Japan in 1976, managed by Universe Maritime in Athens and chartered to Crown Resources, an oil trading firm controlled by Mikhail Fridman, the Russian oligarch. The owner of the Prestige is Mare Shipping, a Liberia-registered company with one asset and when the boat went down it was flying the Bahamian flag, its master was Greek and its crew Filippino.

A demand for a half billion dollar bond from the owners of the Prestige would probably be as useful as a trip to war-torn Liberia to visit the headquarters of Mare Shipping. Ownership in this industry is diffuse, some would say deliberately obscure. A cynic might conclude that the Spanish authorities, having abandoned hope of pinning liability on a fat wallet, have foisted a villain on the public in the form of Captain Mangouras.

Other avenues are being explored, including a lawsuit against the American Bureau of Shipping, an agency that verifies ships are complying with safety standards. The suit alleges that ABS failed to properly inspect the ship and claims evidence of faxed messages from a previous Prestige master to ABS warning of dangerous corrosion. ABS says it never received any faxes.

In the end, that lawsuit too may be a distraction because without definitive proof of why the Prestige broke up, the Spanish Government will find it difficult to prove that ABS failed to spot the defect. That is because the evidence is lying on the seabed at depths of three kilometres.

Instead of seeking scapegoats, perhaps the Spanish Government should seek international solutions, such as more transparency. Why is it so difficult to identify the owner of a vessel? Why are the details of inspections not made available for public view, on the Internet, for example.

In order to secure its borders from Middle Eastern terror, the US has introduced stringent rules on security. US customs can now prevent container vessels from leaving for the US if the coastguard is unhappy with the cargo manifest. But in the case of the Prestige, it is about money and the cost of transporting oil. It is only when the politics of terror distort the argument that safety becomes a primary concern. In the real world, safety is about risk and when risk is just rust, it becomes an equation of cost versus rate of return.

The Spanish courts must decide whether, in a frightening storm in the Bay of Biscay, a ship’s master committed a crime while he was trying to rescue his crew, his ship and himself. You might think that their task is really quite simple.

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