Italian Court Orders RINA to Pay More Than 60 Million Euros Over the Ferry That Sank on Its Way to Safaga

The Civil Court of Genoa has ordered the maritime certification company RINA SpA to pay more than 60 million euros, about 3 billion Egyptian pounds, in compensation to relatives and survivors of about 700 of the victims of the ferry Al Salam Boccaccio 98, Egyptian Streets reported. The first-instance ruling was signed on 14 October by Judge Daniele Bianchi, and identifies the classification society's negligence as the main cause of the disaster.

The ferry sank on the night of 2 to 3 February 2006 while travelling from Saudi Arabia to the Egyptian port of Safaga. Of roughly 1,400 people on board — most of them Egyptian migrant workers returning from Saudi Arabia and pilgrims returning from Mecca — 1,071 died.

In a judgment of about 200 pages, the court accepted an expert report commissioned in late 2022 from Navy Captain Alfredo Cucinotta and engineers Giovanni Fantoni and Alessio Gnecco. Its central finding is that the classification society failed to report a design defect in the internal discharge of the ballast tanks, which left the captain believing that his balancing manoeuvre was working. The operating instructions, including a specific warning in Italian about what to do in the event of a leak, had never been translated into English or any other language the Egyptian crew understood.

According to the reconstruction the court accepted, the fire began in the garage deck, inside a trailer loaded with luggage. The captain, who later disappeared, tried to put it out with the means available, but water built up on the vehicle deck because it could not drain away, and the flooding accelerated the list until the ship capsized and sank.

The court held RINA responsible neither for the start of the fire nor for the captain's orders, but for the lack of information and oversight on a point crucial to the ship's safety. It listed 22 further instances of negligence, among them shortcomings in crew training and in checks on safety drills.

The ship was one of five sister vessels of the "Poeti" series built for the Italian company Tirrenia in 1968. Tirrenia added four decks in 1990 to increase capacity, and in 1999 the five ships were sold to the Egyptian owner El Salam Shipping & Trading. In 2002 the sister ship Petrarca sank in the Red Sea after a fire, with one death.

RINA told the Italian public broadcaster RAI that it was in "profound disagreement" with the verdict. The judgment is at first instance.