The structure of the compound MgVOBO3, is characterized by the presenc
e of ribbons where the spin-1 V3+ ions are randomly located. We presen
t X-ray, susceptibility chi(T) as a function of temperature and high-f
ield magnetization measurements m(H) (up to 45 T) on powdered samples.
These give evidence that in this system, with strong disorder on the
magnetic chains, there are arbitrarily low-energy excitations which ar
e responsible for the power-law dependence of chi(T) and m(H) that we
observe. We find that the magnetic behaviour is reminiscent of the dis
ordered spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic chain. Our theoretical results for
the strongly disordered spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain subs
tantiate the experimental observations.