A GROUP of sailors have been “stranded” on a ship moored in Great Yarmouth for more than 15 months — without having been paid in over a year.

Captain Nikesh Rastogi, from Mumbai, India, has claimed that he was contracted alongside 13 other replacement crew for the Malaviya Twenty ship in February 2017.

The Indian company which owned the ship went into liquidation in 2017 and the agency which took over — Cpn Rastogi’s employers — withdrew from running the ship in January of this year.

All of the original crew have returned to India, but Cpn Rastogi remains aboard with three young crew members who joined the ship in September on six-month contracts.

Cpn Rastogi says the crew are staying on board because they are convinced they will not be paid if they walk off the ship.

He also pointed out that, should he get off the ship, it would be considered derelict, which means “any company could take it over” and annul any owed payments to the workers.

This is not the first time that the Malaviya Twenty ship has gained notoriety.

The ship’s crew made contact with international trade unionists in 2016. In February 2017, following consistent complaints, trade union invigilators discovered that 33 crew members had been signed up to the firm since October 2015 — but not been paid a scrap of wages.

At the time, these complaints raised outcry internationally, raising concerns about modern-day slavery.

The International Transport Federation (ITF) successfully managed to secure $688,000 (£517,000) for workers’ wages from the Indian Bank ICICI.

However, they were called back in August 2017 as Cpn Rastogi’s crew were owed wages again. Since August, matters have been at a total stalemate.

The ITF wish to “arrest” the ship — an old naval term — in order to sell it and raise enough money to pay all of the workers involved in the dispute, as well as to afford the sailors’ repatriation to India.

However, ITF inspector Paul Keenan has said that the Great Yarmouth port, where the ship is moored, is using 19th-century legislation to demand three times the usual rate that it costs to “arrest” a vessel, which the union claims is perverting the course of justice for the sailors.

“It’s entirely within the power of Peel Ports to resolve this,” he said.

A Peel Ports spokesperson told the Morning Star that as it was an ongoing legal matter they were unable to offer any comment.