Captain can keep Navy job despite ship crash

A Royal Navy captain was cleared to resume his promising career yesterday despite running a £170m warship into rocks during a "lapse of attention" at the bridge.

A Royal Navy captain was cleared to resume his promising career yesterday despite running a £170m warship into rocks during a "lapse of attention" at the bridge.

Commander Robert Sanguinetti, 35, who was said to have "considerable potential", was severely reprimanded at court martial after the frigate HMS Grafton hit submerged rocks in a Norwegian fjord.

Sanguinetti, formerly the youngest commanding officer of a major warship when he took charge in December 1998, yesterday admitted negligence after the frigate strayed from a line of Nato vessels.

His navigator, Lieutenant Desmond Donworth, 29, was also severely reprimanded after admitting negligence for his hastily plotted route out of the area. The other six ships in the convoy successfully navigated their way out of the well-marked fjord.

The ship remained stuck on the rocks for more than 24 hours in September last year while fuel was pumped from its tanks in an attempt to free it. Repairs cost more than £220,000 and the ship was out of action for a month, the court martial at Portsmouth was told.

Sanguinetti currently has a desk-bound role and the reprimand will remain on his record for five years. He has not, though, been banned from taking command of a ship, according to a spokesman for the Ministry of Defence.

Sentencing the officers, president of the tribunal Commodore Philip Wilcox said: "We accept on both sides that the incident was a one-off, given the professional competence and ability of you both."

The tribunal found Sanguinetti the "more culpable" but Donworth's plans were "well below the level of support" his captain should have expected. Commodore Wilcox added that they went too quickly through the fjord.

The court was told Sanguinetti failed to scrutinise carefully the route plotted by his navigator as HMS Grafton, one of the fleet's newest ships, with 174 crew, headed out of the fjord 19 miles south of Oslo.

Donworth was forced to navigate by sight after taking only two minutes to plot a new route to make way for a merchant ship. Within 12 minutes of drawing up the new route the ship had grounded. The 3,500-ton vessel had moved from a depth of 50 metres to 11 metres in three minutes.

Donworth, described as "a navigator with panache", had intended to travel down the east side of the fjord but was instructed to move over by the Norwegian authorities.

Despite both men admitting negligence, the court was told that misleading information was given out by onshore authorities. The Nato ships were offered only three pilots with specialist knowledge of the fjord and the commander turned down the offer.

HMS Grafton, commissioned in 1996, is one of the newest of its kind. The 436ft vessel has a top speed of 28 knots and carries missiles, a 4.5-inch gun, torpedoes and a helicopter to hunt down submarines.