A seasoned Russian captain has been branded a criminal in a British court after his gross negligence turned a routine North Sea voyage into a deadly inferno. Vladimir Motin, 59, now faces a prison cell after a jury found him guilty of the manslaughter of a crew member who perished in a collision that could have been an environmental catastrophe.

The verdict, delivered at the Old Bailey in London, brings a grim closure to the tragedy of March 10, 2025. It serves as a chilling reminder to the maritime world that the price of incompetence at sea is paid in human life. For the family of Mark Angelo Pernia, the 38-year-old Filipino sailor who vanished into the flames, the conviction offers justice, but it cannot return the father who never met his youngest child. The collision between Motin’s cargo ship, the Solong, and the anchored tanker Stena Immaculate was not an accident—it was a crime of idleness.

A Collision Course With Disaster

The details of the crash read like a script of preventable errors. The Solong, a 130-meter vessel laden with alcoholic spirits and hazardous sodium cyanide containers, was en route from Grangemouth, Scotland, to Rotterdam. Motin was the sole officer on watch. The sea was his responsibility, yet for 36 agonizing minutes, the massive bulk of the Stena Immaculate sat clearly visible on his radar. He did nothing.

Prosecutors painted a damning picture of a captain asleep at the wheel of duty, if not physically. Motin failed to alter course. He failed to slow down. He failed to sound the alarm. At 9:47 AM, the inevitable happened. The Solong slammed into the stationary tanker, which was holding 220,000 barrels of aviation fuel. The impact tore open the hull and ignited a fireball that raged for eight days.

• The Human Cost: Mark Angelo Pernia was working on the bow at the moment of impact. He died instantly, his body consumed by the fire and never recovered. His wife, seven months pregnant at the time, is now a widow raising two children in a remote village in the Philippines.
• The Environmental Near-Miss: Detective Chief Superintendent Craig Nicholson called it a "miracle" that the aviation fuel on the Stena Immaculate did not ignite fully, which would have caused an ecological disaster of historic proportions off the coast of East Yorkshire.

The Verdict and the Aftermath

Motin stood emotionless as the unanimous guilty verdict was read after eight hours of jury deliberation. His defense—that he had not been grossly negligent—crumbled under the weight of evidence, including the Voyage Data Recorder (VDR) and CCTV footage. The prosecution, led by Tom Little KC, dismantled his account, proving that the captain had ample time to avert the crisis but simply failed to act.

The tragedy highlights the perilous nature of global shipping, where a single lapse in concentration can destroy lives. The Stena Immaculate had a crew of 23; the Solong had 14. That only one man died is a statistical anomaly in what should have been a mass casualty event. Crew members on the tanker were moments away from death; one was even up a mast changing a light fitting when the ships collided.

As Motin awaits sentencing on Thursday, the maritime community is left to reckon with the standards of watchkeeping. For the Pernia family, the legal victory is bittersweet. Prosecutors noted that his widow will have to travel from her remote home to a town with internet access just to watch the man responsible for her husband's death be sent to prison.