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It has been claimed that on or about Dec. 27 the Salem anchored offshore at Durban, South Africa's largest port. By then the crew had painted over the name Salem on the hull, making it read Lema—a simple three-letter switch. The vessel then slipped out of Durban around Jan. 2, Lloyd's believes, with its tanks full of sea water to simulate a full load. Two weeks later, when the ship was almost back on its original schedule, it sank off the Senegalese coast.
The Trident's officers immediately suspected that the Salem's sinking might not have been an accident; for one thing, the oil spillage was unusually small for a fully loaded tanker of that size. Then a talkative Tunisian crew member leaked the story to Senegalese authorities and new information quickly came to light. Detained in Dakar on charges of water pollution, Captain Georgoulis claimed that his ship's log had gone down with the ship. Local police, in piecing together the details, however, learned there was a 30-hour gap from the time of the first "mysterious explosions" to the ship's final descent. Then a Liberian official charged that the 42-year-old captain was not even a certified master: he was carrying the forged license of a Pakistani engineer. One year earlier, moreover, Georgoulis was allegedly involved in the mysterious sinking of a freighter carrying sugar for Saudi Arabia that was blown up off the coast of Lebanon.
In Dakar, Georgoulis dismissed the suggestions of fraud as "complete lies." Last week Soudan was in Switzerland; he has pledged to furnish absolute proof of his innocence. South Africa's Minister of the Economy, Schalk van der Merwe, has insisted that his country's "hands are clean." Lloyd's, however, surmises that after buying the Salem's oil, South Africa then resold it, at a 10% increase, to Rhodesia.
Paying off Shell's huge claim would add to Lloyd's already impressive financial woes. Among other things, the venerable insurance market is being sued by 36 of its member underwriters in a case involving insured Bronx slum buildings put to the torch. Last year, Lloyd's investigated the smoking of five supertankers and dozens of other vessels; it estimates that, worldwide, 100 cargo ships were purposefully sunk in 1979, accounting for losses of $250 million.
Many of these crimes were apparently engineered by a small band of Greek and Lebanese merchant shippers operating from Piraeus and other Mediterranean ports. But the sinking of the Salem may have set a new precedent. Explains Eric Ellen, chief constable of the Port of London: "The Salem is the first such incident involving oil, but we knew it would happen because of the attractiveness of the cargo. It takes an event like the Salem to make people realize how horrific this problem has become."