A group of Hanjin Shipping creditors have filed an appeal with a US appeals court after a district judge took little time to reject their insistence on their right to arrest the South Korean liner operator’s chartered ships.
Lawyers for OceanConnect Marine, Glencore, McAllister Towing & Transportation and Moran Towing filed the case with the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The bunkers suppliers and tug owners claim the rights to seven six Hanjin vessels, including two that OceanConnect already seized before the bankruptcy judge’s nationwide order.
That followed a quick-fire order by US District Judge Kevin McNulty, of the federal court in Newark, in which he took less an hour to deny a hold on a US Bankruptcy Court order that forbids arrests of Hanjin’s owned and chartered ships alike.
McNulty said US Bankruptcy Judge John Sherwood’s order blocking arrest of Hanjin ships as part of the South Korean company’s Chapter 15 case in New Jersey was “reasoned and well considered”.
“The bankruptcy judge concluded that a US court was bound to defer to the South Korean proceeding and not to circumvent the orderly disposition of claims there by permitting an individual creditor to seize assets here,” he wrote.
The creditor group’s lawyers at Simms Showers and Wasserman, Jurista & Stoltz have argued that suppliers have maritime liens against the vessels themselves, and that Hanjin’s bankruptcy shield should not cover chartered vessels because they are not property of the company.
In the US, they are considered secured creditors.
“[The] lien creditors will lose their security and certainly be substantially and irreparably injured if this court denies the stay,” they argued before McNulty’s ruling. “They will receive nothing, becoming unsecured creditors in a Korean bankruptcy proceeding which will pay them nothing.”
