prevent the icebreaker from returning to Alaska on 30 July. While the protesters were eventually removed, allowing the icebreaker to leave, Greenpeace claimed symbolic victory after the protest had forced the icebreaker to turn back and return to the shipyard earlier that day. On 9 July, the United States Coast Guard announced that a boat from NOAAS Fairweather had followed Fennicas track from Dutch Harbor and discovered a previously uncharted rocky shoal where the sea depth was shallower than what was indicated in the nautical charts and about less than the draft of the icebreaker. Controversies In the early 2000s the managing director Kyösti Vesterinen and several other high-ranking members of the Finnish Maritime Administration were caught in a bribery scandal when it was found out that DSND Offshore, the charterer of the Finnish multipurpose icebreakers, had offered them several private trips around the world. At the same time the offshore company, which had failed to make payments for the charters in time, was forgiven 153,000 euros of penalty interests. As a result, Vesterinen and two other officials were found guilty for corruption and as a result lost their positions, were given suspended sentences of four to ten months and had to pay back the unlawfully obtained benefits. The incident ended the co-operation between DSND and the Finnish Maritime Administration and left many people suspicious about the profitability of the multipurpose icebreakers. In October 2013, the Finnish media reported that Heidi Hautala (Green League), the Minister for International Development to the Finnish government and the minister responsible for ownership steering in the Prime Minister's Office, had instructed the state-owned Arctia Shipping to withdraw criminal charges against Greenpeace whose activists had boarded the company's multipurpose icebreakers in 2012. In addition, the head of the Government Ownership Steering Department, Pekka Timonen, had threatened two top executives of the company with firing unless they complied with the request. After providing conflicting accounts of the incident, Minister Hautala announced her resignation on 11 October 2013. Later, several prominent people such as the Finnish Minister of Transport Merja Kyllönen have again questioned the profitability of using the multipurpose icebreakers in offshore business and started a discussion of the future role of the Finnish state-owned icebreaker fleet in commercial work in the Arctic. Criticism Although the crews have been generally satisfied with the vessels' operational capabilities, the multipurpose icebreakers have also been perceived as compromise designs