Khalid Mollah died while working among the thousands who dismantle old ships in Chittagong. Now, in a test case that could transform the industry, his widow is suing the firm that sold the vessel for scrap

Khalid Mollah was uneducated, illiterate and out of work when, in early 2009, he left his pregnant wife Hamida Begum to take the 200-mile bus ride to Chittagong from the small village of Gopai, in northern Bangladesh. The young man’s destination was Sitakunda, the notorious, 20km stretch of wide beach and tidal mudflats just north of Bangladesh’s fast-growing second city.

Here, nearly 25,000 people work in dozens of ship-breaking yards, steel-rolling mills and factories to recover and sell on every bit of plate metal, deck, mast, funnel, hatch, gangplank, wire, nut, cable, bolt, wood and rivet that makes up the world’s giant ships.

Mollah was lucky. He had no experience or training and had never seen the sea but, with the Bangladesh ship-breaking industry expanding fast, he found work quickly as a casual, low-paid “fitter”. His job was to board the towering metal hulks after they had been rammed at full speed up the mudflats at high tide, and then to strip them of anything resaleable or reuseable.

Chittagong is now the graveyard of about 200 large ships a year – one in five of all that are demolished worldwide. It is possibly the biggest global recycling centre, providing more than 2m tonnes of steel for the Bangladesh economy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One in five of all ships that are demolished worldwide end their sailing days at Chittagong’s beaches. Photograph: OLI/Landsat 8/Nasa

But work there is known for being precarious, dirty and dangerous. Hundreds of people, mostly without contracts, die or are injured every year in falls, explosions and accidents. The coastal environment is massively polluted with oils, asbestos and dangerous chemicals. And few people can work for more than a few years in the intense tropical heat without being physically injured.

Mollah quickly discovered the risks. Within months of Hamida, his wife, joining him in Chittagong with their son Hamin, he fell from the side of a ship and broke an arm and a leg.

“I knew that accidents happened every day in the yards, but Mollah’s life was typical [of other workers]. He worked 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week. I cannot recall him in all his years there ever taking a holiday or a day off. He was paid about £125 cash every 15 days, or less than 70p an hour. It was just enough for us to live off after he had sent £10 a month to his elderly father,” she says.

Within 10 years of starting, Mollah was dead. In March 2018 he fell from the eighth storey of the Ekta, a 300,000-tonne super-tanker that was being cut up at the Zuma Enterprise ship-breaking yard on Sitakunda beach. His death certificate, issued by the Chattagram [Chittagong] medical college on 30 March 2018, records that he died of “cardio-respiratory failure due to haemorrhage shock due to polytrauma”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ship-breaking work in Chittagong is known for being precarious, dirty and dangerous. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/Getty

Hamida, who was visiting family at the time of the accident, was only told of her husband’s death by telephone six hours after the accident. “They told me he had died instantly, but I later discovered he had died on his way to the hospital”, she says.

Distraught and impoverished, she was awarded 500,000 Bangladeshi taka (£4,537) compensation, consisting of a statutory 100,000 taka from the government and a contribution from the yard.

But in a test case, she is now suing the company that owned the ship immediately before its last voyage to Chittagong. Maran (UK) Ltd is part of the Greek Angelicoussis shipping group, one of the largest private fleets in the world, with over 30 tankers.

London law firm Leigh Day argues that the accident was foreseeable and that Maran (UK) Ltd, who sold the Ekta for demolition to a Dubai-based company, would have known it was going to Chittagong for demolition and should have anticipated the risk of injury to workers like Khalid demolishing it.

Instead, Leigh Day contends, the international shipping industry, which customarily sells its scrap ships via middlemen, takes advantage of Bangladesh’s weak regulations, using a maze of box numbers, tax havens and intermediaries to distance itself from the dangerous scrapping process.

The result, they argue, is that wealthy shipowners get the highest prices for scrap vessels in the practical certainty that they will be broken up in Bangladesh, where health and safety standards are lower than in any of the world’s other, more expensive but safer, ship-breaking yards, and there is a high risk of workers’ accidents and death.

In a statement to the Guardian, Maran (UK) Ltd said it would be “inappropriate” to respond to allegations that it knew the ship was being sold for scrap in Bangladesh, but said it expected the case to come to the British high court later this year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nearly 25,000 people work in the dozens of ship-breaking yards, steel-rolling mills and factories. Photograph: Majority World/Getty

If successful, Hamida Begum should receive substantially more compensation for her husband’s death. But the case could also exert more pressure on the secretive, close-knit industry to take full responsibility for what happens at the end of their vessels’ lives.

The Ekta was one of the largest oil tankers ever built when launched in 1995 from the Daewoo heavy industries yard in South Korea. Over 330 metres long, eight storeys high and double hulled to prevent spillages, it was classed as a VLCC, or very large crude carrier. But in 25 years of shipping oil from Middle Eastern fields to refineries around the world, this behemoth had its name changed many times and sailed under several different flags, including Greece, Palau and Liberia.

First named the Mindoro, and then the Astro Centaurus after it was bought by CSME, another part of the Greek-owned Angelicoussis shipping group, it was renamed the Maran Centaurus in 2009 and became the Ekta only days before it was beached in Chittagong.

The Ekta has now been completely demolished, its metal and machinery broken up or recycled for construction sites and factories in Bangladesh. But it will go down in history as the ship that attracted the highest ransom ever known to have been paid to pirates.

In November 2009, when it was still named the Maran Centaurus, it was on its way from the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to a refinery in New Orleans with 2m barrels of crude worth $140m (£107m) when it was attacked and seized, 600 miles from the Seychelles islands, by heavily-armed Somali pirates.

Escorted by the pirates to Hobyo on the Somali coast, where other hijacked ships were being held, it was only released weeks later after a shootout with a second pirate group, and after a total of $9m had been paid by airdrop and cash transfer.

It has been established that Maran (UK) Ltd sold the Maran Centaurus for $16,243,106.80 in early September 2017 using an intermediary “cash-buyer” company incorporated in the Caribbean but based in Singapore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labourers board the towering ships to strip them of anything re-saleable or reusable. Photograph: Yousuf Tushar/Getty

According to documents seen by the Guardian, the sale of the ship involved, variously, Maran UK, a London-based shipbroker, a PO-box number company in the British Caribbean tax haven of St Kitts and Nevis, a Dubai-based ship management company, the tiny Pacific island of Palau, a “cash buyer” in Singapore and, lastly, the demolition yard in Bangladesh.

By checking the weekly demolition prices paid for scrap ships in different countries around the date of the sale, it is clear, says Martyn Day, a partner at Leigh Day, that Maran would reasonably have known that it would receive several million dollars more for their ship if it was beached in Chittagong, rather than sent to a country like China for demolition.

Scrap prices at the time of sale of the Ekta were $255 a tonne in China, compared with $385 in India and $405 in Bangladesh. Bangladesh, concludes Leigh Day, was the only commercially attractive destination for the Maran Centaurus.

Once the price had been agreed on 5 September, the new owner, guaranteed by a middleman, would have contracted with Zuma Enterprise scrap yard in Chittagong to demolish the Maran Centaurus. Two weeks later, around 23 September 2017, the vessel left Singapore waters, where it had been waiting. Provided with a new crew, registered with the new name of Ekta and reflagged with the blue and white colours of the tiny Pacific island of Palau, which specialises in low-cost, fast-track registration of ships for their final voyages, it took a week to reach Chittagong.

Maran (UK) Ltd is adamant that it always acts responsibly. On its website, the firm states its intention to “meet or exceed our clients’ expectations by operating all vessels in a safe, efficient and environmentally sustainable manner”. It further states that they give their “highest priority to be the health, safety and security of us and our colleagues on board and ashore:”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Metal from the ships is reworked and goes to the construction industry. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/Getty

But a source in the industry says anonymously: “If the shipping industry chose to dispose of its ships in a responsible manner, breaking yards would be forced to improve their methods and conditions, thereby protecting workers such as Mollah.

“Selling the ships through an intermediary provides a vehicle through which owners are able to attempt to distance themselves from the actual scrapping process whilst maximising the value of their asset.”

Concern over working conditions in Chittagong is well-documented and has been growing for years. The International Labour Organization has declared ship-breaking as the most dangerous job in the world, and in 2010 the World Bank reported that since 1980, 1,200 workers had died in the yards as a result of dangerous conditions. The International Maritime Organisation has called for action and local and international NGOs have all condemned the lack of safety in south Asian yards, where workers are often untrained to handle the hazardous materials founds on ships.

The Bangladesh industry contends that conditions in the yards are continually improving and argues that it is acting in an ecologically responsible manner because everything is recycled or reused. It further argues that if the world wants its ships to be dismantled in a totally safe way in Bangladesh, then richer governments should invest in the yards.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protective equipment for workers is often absent or inadequate. Photograph: Yousuf Tushar/Getty

The steel from the ships is reworked and goes to the construction industry, boilers, compressors and generators are reconditioned and used in the clothing and fishing industries, wood is turned into furniture, and even toxic materials like asbestos are reused, albeit often illegally, in bricks and concrete.

However, the international NGOs Global Labour Rights and Shipbreaking Platform contend that Bangladesh is the world’s cheapest place to demolish old ships as well as the place where severe and fatal accidents happen most frequently.

According to annual lists published by NGOs, over the past decade about 20 workers have been killed each year, with hundreds more injured – mostly from falls, blows, suffocation, heatstroke, falling metal, and fires. Untrained young men like Khalid are the most vulnerable.

‘This is the world’s cheapest place to scrap ships’ – but in Chittagong, it’s people who pay the price Read more

Bangladeshi labour experts agree that many of the yards still offer no legal wage structure, days off, medical care, overtime, job security or safety gear.

“Most workers … are forced to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, and to work day and night shifts. Only permanent workers not involved in breaking ships directly enjoy weekends,” says Pahari Bhattacharjee, an official with the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies.

In a recent seminar, Shib Nath Roy, inspector general of the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments, said: “The number of accidents in the ship-breaking sector has risen over the years. Preventative measures are needed. Many industries do not follow labour laws and safety issues for workers. We are trying to compel them to follow the laws but they are very weak.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest There are few legal protections for workers. Photograph: Majority World/Getty

The Bangladeshi government, which relies on the industry to provide 80% of the country’ steel and thousands of jobs, finds the heavily criticised industry both an international embarrassment and a blessing. This is because, although it is heavily criticised for allowing dangerous work practices, the industry is a key element of the economy. The last thing they want is for the ships to be dismantled in China or India.

But the deaths and injuries continue. Last year, says global union IndustriA, at least 23 workers were killed and a further 75 badly injured in accidents at Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards. Like Khalid Mollah, a large number of the victims were young men.

Nearly one year after the accident, Hamida Begum has been forced to leave Chittagong. Unable to pay rent and feeling unsafe as a lone woman in the city, she handed most of her compensation money to her brother who, in exchange, has agreed to provide food and shelter for her and her son indefinitely. The remainder of the sum leaves her and her teenage son about 40p a day to live on.