Chirac fury as Prestige oil slick hits French beaches

President Jacques Chirac yesterday hit out at the "gangsters of the sea – captains, owners and contractors of ships'' responsible for the massive oil spill which yesterday spread along France's most precious Atlantic beaches and oyster beds.

Experts, who have located more oil off-shore, expect the situation to get worse this weekend.

Most of the oil is from the 77,000-tonne Prestige tanker which broke up off Spain at the beginning of last month and is being swept ashore in semi-solid cakes and small pellets. Some oil, in slicks, seems to have come from other vessels that took advantage of the Prestige wreck to clean their tanks.

After a council of ministers' meeting yesterday morning, President Chirac said he had asked the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to travel immediately to Cap Ferrat in southwestern France. He said: "This was not inevitable, it was the result of human actions. France and Europe must not allow these shady businessmen, these gangsters of the sea, to cynically profit from the lack of transparency in the current system." Supporting a judicial inquiry launched in the Breton city of Brest on Thursday, President Chirac added that "captains, owners and contractors of ships" will be "pursued and criminally punished".

The French government yesterday said €50m (£32m) would be immediately made available for clean-up operations.

French experts estimate that 50,000 tons of the Prestige's total oil cargo did not wash up on Spanish beaches. The ship, which broke in two before sinking to a depth of 3,500 metres, is believed to be still releasing oil at a rate of 100 tons each day. Spanish operations to seal the wreck were aborted on 22 December. Oil-covered sea-birds – chiefly gulls and guillemots – were found off the southwestern French region of Landes at the beginning of the week. On Wednesday laboratory tests confirmed they had been injured or killed by oil from the Prestige.

But it became clear yesterday that a large amount of oil is headed for towns along the Atlantic coast which depend either on fishing or tourism. Two principal areas of oil contamination have been located. One was yesterday centred about 80 kilometres off the coast between Oléron and La Rochelle. The other was located some 220km off Gironde region, to the south.

Christian Frémont, prefect of Aquitaine, said: "These banks of oil are in the process of pulverising themselves into millions of little balls as a result of the wind and heavy seas. They are moving fast.'' Officials in Gironde said new and bigger patches of gummy oil were washing ashore along hundreds of kilometres of French beaches with every incoming tide.

Several southwestern holiday beaches have already been affected, including Biscarosse, Mimizan in the Landes regionn, Montalivet, Hourtin, Carcans-Maubuisson and La Teste in the Gironde.

Michel Sammarcelli, mayor of Cap Ferrat, which is known for its oysters, said: "I think the worst is still to come." He said "millions of small patches of oil are lying on our beaches'' and he added: "The clean-up operation will be painfully slow. We have to spear each and every viscous mound and dump it into a collection bag.''

This latest slick will bring back painful memories of the 1999 spill from the Erika tanker. More than 10 million litres of oil were spilled into the ocean off the Brittany coast causing $860 million (£522m) damage, hitting fisherman, oyster farmers and the tourism industry.

Improvements in the weather mean that clean-up ships will be able to go further out to sea to the worst of the slick. Anti-pollution teams said rough seas, high winds and the consistency of the oil had so far slowed their work.