OzSail is to go to court on 23 March following an investigation by Queensland's Workplace Health and Safety Department.
The charge relates to an incident last May in which Briton Richard Neely and his American girlfriend Allyson Dalton became separated from OzSail's day-diving catamaran Pacific Star during a dive near Airlie Beach, in the Whitsunday Islands.
They endured an afternoon, night and morning drifting along the Great Barrier Reef in lumpy seas before being spotted and plucked to safety by a rescue helicopter, about nine miles from where they had entered the water. The search reportedly involved seven helicopters, three planes and six boats.
Neely and Dalton were accused of rapidly engineering, after brief hospital treatment for mild hypothermia, a highly lucrative deal with a British tabloid newspaper - a claim which the divers said was wildly inaccurate.
It was even insinuated in some press reports that the divers had staged the separation in order to profit from a subsequent story. This was strenuously denied by an aggrieved pair.
A claim that the divers had been told not to venture outside a particular area, but had done so and surfaced too far from the boat to be spotted, was strongly disputed.
In their interview with the Sunday Mirror, the pair said that they surfaced 200m from the moored dive boat but were not spotted and picked up by the shuttle boat - even though they had an SMB and blew their whistles - before drifting away.
After the incident OzSail stated that, once it was realised that the pair were overdue, its crew acted correctly in conducting a search and putting out an emergency call when they realised that the divers were not going to be found.
It was reported that Airlie Beach Water Police did, however, state that the call should have been made about an hour sooner than it was.
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