MOSCOW, January 09. /ITAR-TASS/. The Senegalese charge d’affairs in Moscow said he had no powers to comment on the situation around the detention of Russia’s fishing trawler Oleg Naidenov.

“The Senegalese charge d’affairs has no powers to comment on the incident. The ambassador is currently in Senegal and will be there till the end of the month,” the Senegalese Embassy in Russia told Itar-Tass.

The embassy does not deny reports saying the charge d’affairs has been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry due to the situation around the Russian trawler.

 

Incident with trawler Oleg Naidenov

The trawler Oleg Naidenov was detained off Guinea Bissau on January 4 for suspected illegal fishing, Lieutenant-Colonel Adama Diop, from the public relations office at the Senegalese Army, said last week.

There were 82 persons aboard the ship — 62 Russians and 20 citizens of Guinea Bissau. The trawler was procuring fish off that African country under an inter-governmental agreement, which requires Russian sailors to take locals aboard for training and work.

The trawler belongs to the closed joint stock company Feniks registered in Murmansk, northern Russia. The company said every idle day of the ship in Dakar would cost it one million rubles. “This is an approximate amount and it may increase depending on the time and terms of demurrage,” Yuri Parshev, executive director of Feniks, the company that owns the ship, told Itar-Tass.

“The trawler has been operating in this region for a long time and took on a new Russian crew in Dakar on December 22 — 62 Russian citizens, mainly residents of the Murmansk Region. The ship entered and left the port unhindered,” he said.

Parshev noted, however, that the Senegalese authorities had repeatedly accused Russian ships of breaching fishing rules and imposed fines upon them, including the Oleg Naidenov.

Its owner, senior officials of the Federal Fisheries Agency, the Russian Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, Emergencies Ministry and other relevant organizations have been notified about the incident.

The Oleg Naidenov is a large factory trawler, 120 meters long. It was built in Germany in 1989 and received its current name in 2005 in honor of Murmansk’s first mayor. Prior to that, its name was Leonid Galchenko.