Owner of Suspected Sabotage Ship Loses Bid to Get Anchor Back From Police
Earlier this month, the owner of the "shadow fleet" tanker Eagle S lost a court appeal to regain the freedom of their vessel, which has been held in Finland for an investigation into suspected cable sabotage. On Wednesday, the shipowner also lost a bid to take back the ship's anchor, which Finnish authorities found on the seabed near the cable breaks.
Finland's National Bureau of Investigation believes that it has evidence connecting Eagle S to the outage. On December 25, when Fingrid's EstLink 2 power transmission cable and four subsea telecom cables suddenly shut down, government responders quickly linked the breaks to the position of Eagle S, an LR1 that had just departed the Russian port of Ust-Luga. The tanker was boarded, ordered to raise its anchor, diverted to Finnish waters and detained; Finnish President Alexander Stubb told reporters this week that the vessel would have caused more cable damage within 12 minutes if it had not been stopped. Possible additional targets could have included the Estlink 1 subsea cable and the Balticconnector gas pipeline, which was previously hit by an anchor-drag incident in 2023.
Eagle S was missing an anchor when detained, and attention immediately turned to whether it had cut cables by dragging anchor under power, as suspected in the previous Newnew Polar Bear and Yi Peng 3 incidents. A Finnish-Swedish team located the anchor on the bottom, near the end of a 50-nautical-mile drag track. Photos released to the public show that the anchor has a crack in its crown, and its flukes are much shorter than would be expected of a working vessel's anchor. Photos of the vessel from years past, when it operated under earlier ownership, show that it once carried normal Hall- or Speck-type anchors.
The anchor was recovered and brought ashore for forensic analysis. Shortly after, the vessel's attorney filed a court appeal to force the police to release it to the shipowner, UAE-based Caravella LLC FZ.
Herman Ljungberg, counsel for Caravella, told YLE that Finnish police had no jurisdiction over the vessel or her anchor. Since both were in international waters at the time they were taken into custody, he asserted, Finland's law enforcement reach did not extend to either.
The court disagreed with this interpretation and ruled in favor of the NBI, and the anchor will remain in custody. The bureau's attorneys argued successfully that Finnish law gives them jurisdiction when international acts target Finland - for example, when a ship cuts an international cable that connects to Finnish soil.
Ljungberg said that he would appeal the matter to the Court of Appeal and attempt to regain full control of the ship and the lost anchor. If the legal process takes too long, Eagle S may get trapped in the Baltic Sea's ice season, and would be exposed to conditions for which the vessel was not designed; given that the ship costs about $15,000 per day in upkeep, he said, the anonymous single-ship holding company may simply abandon her and walk away.
Even if the owner leaves the ship behind and stops paying for wages and operating expenses, the nine crewmembers who are suspected of involvement in the cable incident must remain. They are confined to the ship and are under a travel ban to prevent them from leaving the country while the inquiry continues.