The owners and insurers of the grounded container ship the Ever Given, which is holding up an estimated $400 million per hour in trade, face wide-ranging potential claims, according to reports this week.
The BBC noted today that the stranded ship is delaying an estimated $9.6 billion in goods each day and that experts say it could take weeks to free the ship.
The claims related to the grounding could be as varied as lost revenue for the canal, the cost of the salvage operation, damage to the canal itself, and losses related to perishable goods, among other areas, experts recently told Reuters.
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An anonymous shipping lawyer who spoke with the publication put it this way:
It is potentially the world’s biggest ever container ship disaster without a ship going bang.
In an interview with Law.com, marine cargo lawyer Ian Woods of Clyde & Co. provided a glimpse of just how sprawling the related legal matters could be:
In relation to these containership casualties, there’s the potential of 20,000 containers on board. Each container conceivably could have a different cargo owner, cargo insurer, and cargo interest, and all the contracts for the carriage of the goods on board the vessel could be subject to many different laws and jurisdictions.
You could theoretically have up to 20,000 separate claims arising out of this incident, heard in many different jurisdictions around the world and the scope for many different law firms in different countries to be involved and instructed, once these claims have worked their way up and down the contractual chains involved. They’re quite complicated in that respect.
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Suez Blockage Is Holding Up $9.6B in Goods Each Day [BBC]
Stranded Suez Ship’s Owner, Insurers Face Millions in Claims [Reuters]
Suez Drama: Legal Ramifications Will Be Exponential, Lawyers Say [Law.com]
Jeremy Barker is the director of content marketing for Breaking Media. Feel free to email him with questions or comments and to connect on LinkedIn.