Conbulk Shipmanagement has joined the container shipowners that have stopped sending ships to the Red Sea, according to its chief executive Dimitris Dalakouras.
“We have stopped trading there. This will have very bad consequences in general if everybody stops, to the local economy, to the local economic entities, including the Houthis themselves,” he told the Capital Link forum in London today.
The move follows repeated attacks on one of the Greek owner’s vessels, the 2,490-teu container ship Groton (built 2002), which was hit by a missile on 3 August while trading into the region and targeted again early this month.
The Liberian-flag vessel — was is chartered to CMA CGM and insured by the Swedish Club — was one of three Conbulk vessels trading to the region.
Dalakouras said: “Until our incident, the Houthis were avoiding engaging with vessels trading on regional trade. They were actually targeting mostly the vessels trading from the Pacific coast to the Mediterranean.
“It mainly has to do with the crew safety. Once the crew is in danger, all the discussion stops,” he said.
The move brings Conbulk into line with other small boxship tonnage providers that have also refused to allow vessels to trade to the region.
MPC Container Ships chief executive Constantin Baack said: “We discontinued trading immediately because the safety of the crews is of utmost importance. And earning a few dollars more doesn’t justify any of this.
“So we were in quite a lot of discussions with some of our charters because the charterparties obviously included clauses that did not prevent them from trading through the Red Sea.
“We will only continue once there is safety for the crew and I think that is the overriding principle from our standpoint.”
Leonhardt & Blumberg managing director Torben Kolln agreed that the risks were too great to justify higher charter rates.
He said: “You can argue that the crew can take their own risk, but we have seen that there is also an environmental risk and who is willing to take that?
“So for us, it is absolutely no good to go to Red Sea and also now we extended the area to the Gulf of Aden. It is an enormous area. Every week, every second week we hear terrible things.
“I cannot understand how you can still go there. It is insane actually,” Kolln said.
Euroseas chief financial officer Anastasios Aslidis said his company was putting in charter clauses that avoided going to the Red Sea “by and large”.
