Francesco Schettino, the man who captained the Costa Concordia on the night it crashed into rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio, pointed the finger at his helmsman in court on Monday, arguing the disaster would not have happened if the crew member had been quicker to carry out his orders.

Speaking at his trial on charges of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship, the 52-year-old Italian blamed the cruise ship's Indonesian helmsman for having failed to properly execute an emergency move that Schettino said would have averted the collision.

Thirty-two people died when, on the night of 13 January 2012, the 300-metre-long ship ran aground close to the shore and became impaled on pinnacles of rock. Last week, in a salvage operation of unprecedented scale and complexity, engineers managed to parbuckle the Concordia and bring her upright in preparation – it is hoped – for towing next year.

Speaking in the theatre in Grosseto, which has been repurposed for his highly publicised trial, Schettino said the catastrophic crash would have been avoided if Jacob Rusli Bin had done what he had been ordered to do – namely, steer the tiller quickly to the left.

The helmsman waited 13 seconds to move the tiller, the court heard. "If it weren't for [his] error, to not position the tiller to the left, the swerve [towards the rock] and the collision would not have happened," said Schettino.

However, this was disputed by an expert who said that, while the Indonesian crew member had made a mistake, it made little difference to the outcome. "The helmsman was 13 seconds late in executing the manoeuvre but the crash would have happened anyway," said Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone.

Schettino – the sole defendant in the trial – denies the charges against him, arguing that he has been made a scapegoat for a much wider failure for which others are also to blame. Five employees of Costa Crociere, the ship's owner, were granted plea bargains and given relatively light prison sentences in July.

They included the helmsman, who was given a sentence of one year and eight months. He is unlikely to go to jail due to efforts to tackle overcrowding in Italian prisons.

Now that the ship is back in a vertical position following its 19-hour-long parbuckling, Schettino's lawyers argue that court-appointed experts should be able to go on board to carry out an inspection of the vessel. They say a closer look at why water pumps and an emergency generator failed is crucial to an understanding of the tragedy.

"It is now possible to conduct an expert search for evidence on board the Concordia," said Francesco Pepe, one of Schettino's lawyers. Any technical faults, he added, would be fundamental to interpreting what happened.

After he was heard being ordered repeatedly by a furious coastguard to "get back on board" the rapidly listing ship to help rescue his passengers, the captain has taken most of the blame for the disaster. He was dubbed "captain coward" by the international media and only last week was stripped of his maritime licence.

But, for Schettino and some of the 4,200 passengers and crew who were on board that night, the focus is unfair. "The thing that is unjust is that there is only one person on trial," Michelina Suriano, a lawyer for one group of passengers, told Reuters. "He does have his guilt, but he should be here with a lot of other people." The other sentences given after plea bargains, she added, were insufficient.