A Staten Island container terminal is accusing boxship giant Maersk Line of putting it on the brink of closure by abruptly moving its business to an affiliated terminal nearby in New Jersey.
A lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, Global Container Terminals' (GCT) New York facility said the shipowner sent a letter 10 April — Good Friday, when the business was closed — disclosing it was backing out of its 2018 agreement to route container traffic on three lines there exclusively.
The departure of traffic, roughly 20 months before the deal was set to expire, would trim the terminal's revenues by more than $60m, it said, and plunge its Ebitda into the red.
“Without positive EBITDA, the Terminal will cease to be a going concern and its continued viability will be jeopardized,” said the complaint, which requests the court block Maersk’s decision.
Maersk and subsidiary Hamburg Sud send nearly 4,000 teu per week to the facility via its West Coast South America-East Coast US, East Coast South America-East Coast US and its North Atlantic services. The West Coast South America line is run with Hapag-Lloyd.
According to the lawsuit, Maersk should have to wait until June 2021 to give notice they were ending the deal ahead of its 31 December 2021 expiry.
Instead, Maersk said it would be changing terminals effective 1 May. It said it was willing to pay $2m, in accordance with termination fees laid out in the contract, plus another $3.4m in consideration for its exit and to satisfy all outstanding obligations.
In a statement, Maersk said GCT's argument that it would have to close is overstated, as the company owns a facility in New Jersey and two more in British Columbia.
"We believe claims that Global Container Terminal, which is owned by multi-billion dollar investment funds, will go out of business as a result of this contract dispute to be intentionally inflated to create unnecessary fear during this time of uncertainty and the product of a litigation strategy to distract from the contractual rights and remedies that Global Container Terminal previously negotiated and now regrets," it said.
The lawsuit further alleges that Maersk routed two ships, the 6,622-teu Cap Andreas (built 2013) and the 6,690-teu Maersk Karachi (built 1998) to an AMP Terminals facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
That terminal, owned by Maersk subsidiary APM, is across Arthur Kill from the GCT facility.
The lawsuit said Maersk intends to move all its container traffic there.
