Greenpeace investigates the oil spill from the notorious Russian pelagic trawler, Oleg Naydenov, which sunk in Canary Islands waters after it caught fire in the port of Las Palmas on April 11, 2015. The ship sunk with 1,400 tonnes of fuel in its tanks, threatening the fragile marine sites in the Canary region. Greenpeace has also confirmed that the ship was en route to Mauritania in West Africa where it carried out several fisheries violations in the past.
Since 2010, irrefutable evidence of illegal fishing activities of the Oleg Naydenov ship were documented and exposed by Greenpeace in West Africa and other coastal states. Despite the availability of substantial evidence on the illegal activities of the Oleg Naydenov, the persistent offender vessel continued to be accepted in some countries of the region.