Tag: US Court

Steamship Mutual presents the case of Ross v W&T Offshore Inc 2018 WL 6492762 (E.D. La. Dec. 10, 2018), according to which the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana explained which are the criteria applied by the courts when assessing an injured party’s status in respect of claims brought under the Jones Act and general maritime law.

A federal grand jury in Wilmington, Delaware, returned a six-count indictment on April 23, charging Chartworld Shipping Corporation, Nederland Shipping Corporation, and Chief Engineer Vasileios Mazarakis with failing to keep accurate pollution control records, falsifying records, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering, the Justice Department announced.

A US Federal judge threatened that she might block Carnival Corporation from docking cruise ships at ports in the US as punishment for a possible probation violation. The cruise company has been on five years probation, from April 2017, as part of a $40m settlement for dumping oil into the ocean illegally from its Princess Cruises ships and subsequently lying about the scheme, according to court filings.

As Standard Club informs, on 19 February 2019, the Commercial Court decided that the rule established in The Aries  1 WLR 185 (HL), as per which freight must always be paid and claims cannot be set off against it, did not apply to freight forwarders. With respect to whether or not the low water levels constituted a force majeure event, the Court decide that it was not.

On March 27 Toyota Tsusho Petroleum filed a complaint against Nustar Energy Services at a US Court. The file regarded alleged off-spec bunkers, and TTP seeks $421,784.94 from NES through two claims. Namely, on April 19, 2018, NES supplied 840 metric tonnes (mt) of IFO 380 to the Singapore-flagged chemical tanker 'M/V Beatrice' at the Port of Houston.

Aegean Marine Petroleum, a marine fuel logistics company, published a statement according to which its re-organization plan has been approved by the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. This development leads the way for the Company to emerge from Chapter 11 restructuring as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mercuria Energy Group Limited.

The US Supreme Court on March 26 did not allow American sailors injured in the deadly 2000 al Qaeda bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole to collect the $314.7 million in damages from the government of Sudan for its alleged role in the attack. The ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that had allowed the sailors to collect the damages from certain banks that held Sudanese assets.

US Attorney Halsey B. Frank announced that a 30-year-old man from Cushing, Maine was sentenced in US District Court by Judge D. Brock Hornby to four years in prison and three years of supervised release for Seaman’s Manslaughter for causing the death of two crewmen who were then 26 and 15 years old. The man pleaded guilty on September 25, 2018.

A Czech seafarer was awarded $225,000 for blowing the whistle on his employer, a German shipping company, over maintaining false official records to conceal deliberate pollution from its ship 'Marguerita'. The case was brought in the spotlight in November 2018.

Aegean announced that the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York approved its final motion regarding the $535 million in aggregate Debtor-in-Possession financing from Mercuria Energy Group. In the beginning of November, Aegean had filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code.