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A container ship catches fire in the Arabian Sea. Your cargo is in a hold that never burned, on a vessel you do not own, in a casualty you had nothing to do with. Weeks later you receive a demand for 54 percent of the value of your goods before anyone will release them. That is not a mistake and it is not extortion. It is general average, one of the oldest surviving principles in commercial law, and the demand is enforceable. For cargo interests it is the single most surprisi

[Image from Wikimedia Commons, from User Unukorno, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0] On January 9, 2025, a 152,000 dwt crude tanker suffered a total blackout in the Baltic Sea. She drifted unmanned in heavy seas, lost all maneuverability, and came into German territorial waters off the island of Rügen. German authorities towed her to an anchorage off Sassnitz to prevent a spill. She is still there. The Eventin has now been at anchor off a German resort island for more than ni

An oil spill off the coast of Oman has spread across somewhere between 390 and 2,000 square kilometers, depending on whose satellite analysis you accept, and reached roughly 40 kilometers of mainland coastline near Ras Madrakah on August 12. The source is a half-sunk tanker called the Caroline Bezengi, aground in the Arabian Sea, leaking crude for approximately six weeks with no effective containment. The vessel is 81,085 gross tons. It has held no classification from an IACS

[Photo by Bayu Tiyo on Unsplash] Ask a bunker buyer who they bought their last stem from and you will usually get a company name. Ask what that company's role was in the transaction and the answer is less certain than it should be. The confusion is widespread and it is not the buyer's fault. The three roles in marine fuel supply are genuinely distinct in law and in risk, but the market presents them inconsistently, some companies perform more than one, and the commercial conv