IT’S AN ill omen but this time they have no plans to shoot the albatross, just hound and persecute the pathetic creature by locking it up for months awaiting trial.

The European Union’s directive on criminal sanctions for ship-source pollution is creating huge anxiety among seafaring folk. Shipping companies talk of senior officers and captains seeking early retirement while graduates of maritime colleges fret about their choice of career.

Forget about monsters of the deep and Davy Jones’s Locker; if you find yourself at the helm of a 200,000-tonne tanker, the real danger is ashore, snug in the arms of a leather-backed chair in a municipal courthouse. The ragged rock lurking beneath the surface is a public prosecutor in Galicia or Cherbourg, or perhaps Dover, determined to defend his coastline from the fearsome pirates of the merchant marine.

The directive, which came into effect in September, criminalises polluters at sea, a good thing given the damage caused by oil slicks, except that this directive is unnecessary. Marpol, the international convention on pollution at sea, creates liability for intentional or reckless pollution but the EU directive goes much further: a ship’s master can be prosecuted and jailed for making a mistake.

The law, supported by Britain and which must be implemented in each member state by March 2007, has invented a state of criminal mind called “serious negligence”, a grey area between negligence (which never carries a criminal sanction) and recklessness.

Unwilling to become guinea pigs in a European criminal science laboratory, where lawyers will attempt to split ever more slender strands of carelessness, a coalition of shipping organisations is challenging the new law. Intertanko, an organisation of tanker owners, is joined by Intercargo, which represents shippers of bulk dry cargoes, the Greek Shipping Co-operation Committee, Lloyd’s Register and the International Salvage Union in seeking judicial review of the law in the European Court of Justice.

The core of the legal challenge is that the EU’s duty to comply with Marpol conflicts with the directive. However, the wider concern is that the new law opens the door to vindictive prosecutions, not just of owners but of ships’ officers, crews and, nonsensically, salvage companies. What is the incentive to rescue a stricken vessel if the company risks criminal prosecution when its actions accidentally contribute to a pollution incident? The shipping community is in part to blame for the tide of opprobrium washing over it. The industry’s complexity, involving layers of responsibility between owners, managers, charterers and cargo owners, is impenetrable to outsiders and creates an aura of secrecy, reinforced by the behaviour of some unscrupulous shipowners.

Prosecutors are slavering at the mouth. You have only to ask Apostolos Mangouras, the Greek master of the Prestige, which foundered off Cape Finisterre in 2002, leaking 80,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil on to Spanish beaches. It was his first SOS in 32 years and in a force 10 gale with 25-foot waves, he tried to rescue his ship after being refused safe haven in a Spanish port. Desperate for a scapegoat, the Spanish authorities threw him in jail for three months and then kept him under house arrest for a year pending trial. Numerous investigations blamed the pollution incident on the decision by Spanish authorities to refuse the Prestige access to a port.

This law is all about blame when what matters is enforcement of standards. Instead of raising standards, this law will raise costs — the cost of insuring crews, of insurance for ships’ surveyors and indemnities for salvage companies will soar.

There will always be the cheaper option, the obscure Liberian company with antique ships and funny crews, always ready to sail at a lower rate. It’s risky, but at least it’s cheap.

Falling out over lunch

IS ANGELA MERKEL a friend of France or foe? Tiny doubts have surfaced in the Elysée Palace over the new German Chancellor’s susceptibility to Gallic emotional blackmail. All seemed well this week when Frau Merkel attended a celebration of Franco-German cultural links at Versailles. She delivered the usual platitudinous mutual congratulation.

Yet she turned her French host down on a matter that is causing unending grief among the hard-pressed restaurateurs of the Fifth Republic. President Chirac requested her support for a reduced rate of VAT — 5.5 per cent — on restaurant bills. The weakened French economy and high unemployment are hurting spending on meals out and the Government promised to give the lunch trade a break.

But the German Government is raising VAT from 16 per cent to 19 per cent in an effort to balance the books, so she turned him down. In boring old Germany, it seems, lunch is not free.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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