Lucinda Beaman, Alexander Christie-Miller in Istanbul and James Bone in Giglio Island
A class action lawsuit against Costa Cruises, the company that operated the Costa Concordia, will be launched in the US next week on behalf of the thousands of passengers of the disaster-struck ship.
The Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Italy last week, with 11 people confirmed dead and 21 passengers still missing. Hundreds were injured.
Codacons, Italy’s consumer association and two US law firms told the BBC they would file the suit against Costa Cruises on behalf of the ship’s passengers. The law firms said they would be asking for at least $160,000 (£105,000) for each passenger, of which there were more than 3,000.
Mitchell Proner, a lawyer with US law firm Proner & Proner, told the broadcaster: “Along with Codacons, we have formed an association and our firms are collectively going to be filing a suit in Miami, by Wednesday next week, on behalf of all the victims of the Costa Concordia disaster.”
Mr Proner said claimants would be seeking compensation for continued medical care, loss of earnings as well as the psychological impact they had suffered while trying to get off the ship. He said that some of the claimants would seek two or three times the minimum claim, while the worse cases could seek as much as 1 million euro.
In a statement, Costa Cruises said that while the company was currently focusing on the immediate tragedy, as an “initial gesture” it had sent letters to passengers “asking them to detail their expenses and any costs they might have incurred so reimbursements can be made.”
Marco Ramadori, the president of Codacons, said Costa Cruises’ offer was insufficient.
“They are offering to refund the cost of the ticket as if you had missed a plane and lost your luggage. You cannot compare the two,” he said.
Costa Cruises has begun the process of launching a civil claim against Franceso Schettino, Costa Concordia’s captain, in Italy, but Mr Proner said that the firm could not pin all responsibility for the disaster on a “rogue captain”.
A British survivor has also begun legal action against Costa Cruises for losing her husband’s ashes at sea. Sandra Rodgers, 62, from Chester, who lives in Menorca, said: “We had planned to scatter Barry’s ashes when the cruise passed Monaco, because he had always wanted to see the Monaco Grand Prix.”
Meanwhile, Father Raffaele Malena, the ship’s chaplain, has recounted how Mr Schettino wept in his arms on the shore of the island of Giglio in the hours after the boat ran aground.
“I spoke to the captain. He embraced me for about a quarter of an hour and cried like a baby,” Father Malena told French magazineFamille Chrétienne.
Questions have also been raised about whether the Moldovan hostess seen dining with the captain of the Costa Concordia was warned that the ship was going down long before the call to abandon ship.
Domnica Cemortan, 25, had all her belongings with her as others left with nothing, said Alexander Banescu, a fitness instructor who had been working on the liner for four months.
“I heard that she was on the bridge when it happened,” he told The Times. “I think she was on the first boat off. The crew members all left the ship with nothing. She was wearing warm clothes and had her bag packed. She had everything — her documents, her money. How could she have known?”
Ms Cemortan had spent six months on the ship as an interpreter for Russian passengers, but stayed aboard at Civitavecchia as a passenger. “Everyone knows she was there for a reason,” Mr Banescu, 25, said. “We heard that she is [the captain’s] girlfriend.”
Ms Cemortan, who had worked as a cruise ship dancer, insisted yesterday that she was not Captain Francesco Schettino’s lover. She told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: “He always shows everyone photos of his daughter when she was young. A man who wants a lover doesn’t behave like that.”
She said that she was a regular ticketed passenger with a cabin. “I bought the ticket in Italy with my own money.” Ms Cemortan has said that she was dining with friends in the restaurant on Deck 3, and the captain was not with them. When the lights went out, she was alerted by a “coded alarm” known openly to the crew.
She climbed on to the bridge to help to translate officers’ instructions for Russian passengers. “I repeated in Russian what he [the captain] or his deputy told me in Italian. ‘Go back to your cabins. It’s only an electrical fault.’ This phrase I repeated ten times. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what was happening.” She said that she left the ship at 11.50pm, leaving the captain on the bridge.
Her account of the announcements was reinforced by amateur video that recorded the crew telling passengers: “Go back to your cabins please. We have made an announcement in the name of the captain. We have finished dealing with the problem that we have with the generator.” The announcement ended: “It’s all under control.”
Pier Luigi Foschi, chairman and chief executive of Costa Cruises, said he could not sleep because of the “neither normal nor justifiable” delay of over an hour in abandoning ship. “If it had been abandoned earlier, we would not have lost any human lives,” he told Corriere della Sera. He firmly denied suggestions that company officials ashore had delayed the evacuation to avoid paying compensation to passengers, and suggested that Captain Schettino had misled the company. “I believe he hasn’t been honest with us,” he said.
The wreck of the Costa Concordia was slipping at up to 1.5cm an hour yesterday, raising fears that it could slide down a nearby slope and break up. Divers suspended the search, but a robot equipped with remote control cameras surveyed the vessel.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article3293962.ece
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