Danish owner Torm will not be sending its ships back to the Red Sea without Western military assurances on safety.
Chief executive Jacob Meldgaard said he was saddened by the deaths of three seafarers in the Houthi attack on the Barbados-flag 50,448-dwt bulker True Confidence in the Gulf of Aden on Monday.
“I don’t know, but my mental picture would of course be that we’re not going to see more transits tomorrow and onwards than what we had so far this year, everything else being equal,” he added.
“In my opinion, this is not an economic decision. Since the US military started their actions against the Houthi military capability, I think this has been a safety question,” Meldgaard told TradeWinds.
“And I think more people will come to the same conclusion in the coming days,” he added.
Asked what it would take for Torm’s tankers to return, the Danish boss said: “We would look to the military. We would look them in the eyes, whether literally or just metaphorically, and say can you now say that you believe this is a safe environment for commercial vessels?”
If these assurances were forthcoming, “then I think we would go ahead and make our own case-by-case assessment”, Meldgaard added.
The stance would be, “OK, we’re getting the assurances from the US military and the coalition that this is safe for our people to pass through,” he explained.
So Torm would then make its own evaluation.
“My opinion is that nobody knows what the Houthis are up to,” he told TradeWinds.
Meldgaard said he had been told by a former US official with knowledge of the Middle East that the US is now “mowing the lawn” in Yemen with its military strikes.
“You can’t make it disappear, but they’re taking the spikes out of it. I think that’s as good as it gets right now,” Meldgaard added.
