Veteran ship financier Joep Gorgels has ended his 20-year stint with Dutch lender ABN Amro.
He is stepping down as the head of shipping.
His successor will be appointed next month, at which stage the Amsterdam-based bank plans to “centralise” the shipping department.
An experienced shipping executive praised for his promotion of green finance, Gorgels started work with the bank in 2002.
He was appointed managing director of ABN Amro’s Global Transport & Logistics (GTL) department in September 2017, having previously held several roles, including country executive for Norway for five years.
Shipping remains one of five core sectors that ABN AMRO focuses on internationally.
But from April, it plans to centralise all shipping activities into a single department to replace its GTL department.
“ABN Amro will keep on serving its shipping clients out of Amsterdam, Oslo and Athens and has the ambition to steadily grow its activities in European shipping financing,” it said.
ABN Amro praised Gorgels for his “thought leadership on sustainability”, adding: “He was instrumental to the successful development of the global shipping and intermodal sector during so many years.”
ABN Amro made a strategic decision in August 2020 to pull back from shipping clients in the US and Asia.
It said it was retrenching to serve core shipping clients based in Europe, with plans to close offices in New York and Singapore.
Those plans gathered pace last July with the sale of $700m in shipping and intermodal loans to European lender Credit Agricole.
The US withdrawal marked a new direction for a lender that has been one of shipping’s most aggressive and influential over the past decade.
Among the US-based owners with ABN Amro as part of their lending group are Genco Shipping & Trading, Eagle Bulk Shipping, Diamond S Shipping, International Seaways, Scorpio Bulkers and Scorpio Tankers.
The shift in strategy is expected to affect 800 people, including around 150 in Amsterdam, with the rest in Asia-Pacific and the Americas.
