Almost 21 years after the sinking of the Al Salam ferry Boccaccio '98, the civil court of Genoa, with a sentence of first instance filed on 17 September, recognized the responsibility in the affair of the company of Italian RINA certification and classification, requiring it to compensate the approximately 700 family members of the victims of the disaster.

On the night between 2 and 3 February 2006 the ship was on its way from Dhiba, Saudi Arabia, to Safaga, Egypt, when it broke out a fire in the garage and the ferry overturned and sank causing the death of over a thousand people, while the survivors there were less than 400.

The First Civil Chamber of the Court, sole judge Daniele Bianchi, endorsed the conclusions of the panel of three court-appointed technical consultants who, at the end of 2022, were entrusted with a technical consultancy produced in 687 pages. In the sentence it is The dynamics of the accident have been reconstructed, starting with the fire developed on board which was located in a trailer loaded with placed in the garage. The water used to extinguish it and the difficult drainage caused "a progressive lurch of the ship to starboard". The captain then decided to ballast the left-wing compartments, but "this manoeuvre is proved fatal". "In fact - continues the sentence - The ballast crates, once filled, spilled the excess water in the garage through air vents which, unlike the common construction practices, did not discharge overboard, but inside the garage room itself". "This caused the flooding of the ship in a short time, the further swerve to the right of the same with the overcoming of the critical threshold of stability and, finally, the reversal and the sinking of the unit".

The court starts from the role in the RINA affair which, for the classification, roadworthiness and certification functions, was "holder of a qualified position of guarantee in order ship and navigation safety, with specific obligations to verify and approve the procedures for safety provided on board as well as their concrete feasibility". The sentence highlights the crux of the configuration of the air vents, considered "absolutely infrequent and dangerous". According to the sentence, it was never "adequately highlighted in the technical documentation", neither "transformed into an operational constraint", nor "made known to the seafarers". In addition, the Decision Support System, "in essence an emergency manual for officers", was "lacking in instructions fundamental" on the maneuvers to be done in the event of skidding.

The judgment also mentions the problem of language, being all on-board documentation, including emergency manuals and the instructions approved as part of the classification, "drawn up exclusively in Italian, a language not known or knowable by the Egyptian crew". So - specifies the sentence - deprived himself "de facto of the commander and his ability to understand the information fundamental for the management of plants and emergencies". The judge recalls that the ship had been sold by Tirrenia to the Pacific Sunlight Marine on April 7, 1999, and that "the predominantly non-Italian nationality of the crew could be ignored. He also cites Rule 14 of the Code International Maritime Safety Management (ISM): the Safety Management Certificate "cannot be issued" without verification that the information has been provided in a language understood by the staff.

According to the court, it is this omission that generates The captain's mistake: "The main cause of the shipwreck is recognizable in the negligent conduct" of the company. In the words of the experts, the failure to highlight the specific characteristics of the ship "caused a lack of knowledge that had a direct causal link with the wrong decisions taken in the agitated moments of the emergency". And again: "the mistake made by the commander [...] was itself a consequence of the negligence" of RINA. For the consultants, the lack of comprehensible documentation rendered the most difficult emergency and "probably" made more victims.

RINA argued that the conduct of the commander was exceptional and unpredictable and had interrupted the causal link. The judge replies that that conduct "does not constituted a completely atypical path", and that the causal link must be assessed with the criterion of "more probably not". The decision to ballast on the left "was indeed determined precisely by the omissions attributable" to the RINA.

The judgment then lists 22 further profiles of negligence detected by experts, structural changes approved without sufficient information for the checks on the safety exercises. The judge draws from it "a attitude of constant and widespread inattention to compliance obligations".

Part of the court's decision concerns compensation already paid in Egypt by the shipowner. Those criteria, linked to the Islamic inheritance rules, assigned half to women than men in the same family position. For the court those rules cannot produce effects in Italy because they are contrary to international public order. The receipts already signed have not been cancelled in full: it is nothing only the discriminatory part. Women therefore receive the difference from a male relative in the same position. If a Son had received 100 and a daughter 50, she received another 50.

In a note replying to the ruling, RINA says it is "in profound disagreement" with the pronouncement and recalls that two technical investigations, including that of the flag State, and various criminal and administrative proceedings would have led the shipwreck to the conduct of shipowner and captain, «without attribute any liability to RINA". The company, In addition, it reserves the right to extend the comments later.