The captain of an oil tanker that is allegedly part of Russia's "shadow fleet" will stand trial in France early next year over his alleged failure to justify the vessel's nationality, a French prosecutor has said.
It comes after the captain and the chief mate of the Boracay, a tanker currently immobilised off the country's Atlantic coast, were detained by the French authorities, shortly after an investigation was launched into the ship and its crew.
After being taken into police custody on Tuesday, the pair, who are both Chinese, were subsequently released, with the first mate not facing any charges.
Prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger said the captain had been summoned for trial in the western port city of Brest on 23 February.
He faces up to one year in prison and a 150,000-euro ($176,000) fine over the alleged offence of “failure to justify the nationality of the vessel".
Prosecutors, who also probed him and his colleague over the crew's “refusal to cooperate”, said he could not be held directly responsible for that offence.
The Boracay left the Russian oil terminal in Primorsk near St. Petersburg on 20 September and sailed off the coast of Denmark en route to India.
It was cited by European naval experts as possibly being involved in drone incursions into Danish airspace.
The tanker, whose name has changed several times, was sailing under the flag of Benin and appears on a list of ships targeted by EU sanctions against Russia.
The French navy boarded the vessel over the weekend, after suspicions were raised about its nationality, said the French military spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet.
The ship was ordered to stay in place in a safe area, he said.
It has stayed off the coast of the western French port of Saint-Nazaire since Sunday, according to the Marine Traffic monitoring website.
The French President Emmanuel Macron has alleged that the tanker belongs to Russia's so-called shadow fleet of aging tankers of uncertain ownership and safety practices that are avoiding Western sanctions over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On Thursday, he praised the work of the French navy to "identify the presence of a shadow fleet".
"You kill the business model by detaining even for days or weeks these vessels and forcing them to organise themselves differently," he said.
Speaking at a European leaders’ defence summit in in Copenhagen, Macron suggested that "30 to 40%" of Russia's war effort is "financed through the revenues of the shadow fleet".
"It represents more than €30 billion. So it's extremely important to increase the pressure on this shadow fleet, because it will clearly reduce the capacity to finance this war effort for Russia," he said.
Macron claimed the ship, which was said to be flying a fake flag, was "exactly the same" one that was detained by Estonia earlier this year.
In April, Estonian public broadcaster EE reported that the vessel, then identified under the name Kiwala, was stopped outside Tallinn Bay over concerns about its flag, as it made its way to the Russian port of Ust-Luga .
At the time, Prime Minister Kristen Michal tweeted that Estonia's navy had "detained a sanctioned vessel with no flag state" and authorities had boarded the ship.
Asked by journalists about it, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he had "no information" on the ship. He also said that many countries were carrying out "provocative actions" against Russia.
