According to the Kommersant business daily, a total
of $4 million was paid to free the Faina, which was hijacked off the
Horn of Africa on September 25, 2008, and released on February 5.
Earlier it was reported that $3.2 million was paid, but the paper said
an additional $800,000 was sent to the pirates for food and water.
The
pirates had initially demanded a $35 million ransom for the vessel,
which was carrying 33 T-72 tanks and other heavy weaponry to be
delivered to Kenya.
"Without the help of the Ukrainian
government, the ship owners wouldn`t have been able to do anything, and
the Faina would still be in the pirates` hands without any guarantee of
being released for a long time," said the editor of Sovfracht Maritime
Bulletin, Mikhail Voitenko, who took part in the negotiations with the
Somali pirates.
Voitenko said that it was not the ship owners, but "Ukraine that paid the Britons who until January were acting as moderators."
Kyiv
denied accusations that it had paid a ransom. "The government cannot
finance terrorism," the daily quoted the Ukrainian Security Council`s
deputy secretary, Stepan Gavrish, as saying. "If Ukraine had paid the
pirates, then that would have disrupted international society."
Ukrainian
President Victor Yushchenko said last week that negotiations on the
ransom were near completion, but were twice disrupted because of
outside interference. Because of that, it was decided to decrease the
number of people who were informed on the operation. The daily reported
Yushchenko as saying that the third phase of the operation was handled
by its foreign intelligence service.
According to the daily,
the decision to make the operation top secret was made in mid-January,
after which the foreign intelligence service stopped passing
information on to the Security Council`s Crisis Committee and other
government bodies. That would explain why Ukraine`s Foreign Ministry
for a long time said it knew nothing about the ransom money being paid
to the pirates, the daily reported.
The crew of 17 Ukrainians,
two Russians and one Latvian were met at the airport in Kyiv by family
members and the president on Friday. The body of the Faina`s Russian
captain, Vladimir Kolobov, who died of a heart attack soon after the
hijackers seized the ship, will arrive home in St. Petersburg on
Tuesday. His funeral is scheduled for Thursday.
According to
the UN, Somali pirates carried out at least 120 attacks on ships in
2008, resulting in combined ransom payouts of around $150 million.
Around
20 warships from the navies of at least 10 countries, including Russia,
are involved in anti-piracy operations off Somalia. The East African
country, ravaged by years of civil war, has no functioning government.
RIA Novosti
