Italian shipowner d'Amico Dry has thrown out its lawsuit against Lighthouse Navigation over the costs of an insect infestation on a bulker.
The company's lawyers filed papers in a federal court in Houston announcing that it voluntarily dismissed the case "with prejudice", meaning that it cannot be filed again.
That came four days after US magistrate judge Andrew Edison issued an order seizing up to $1.58m-worth of bunkers on a Lighthouse-chartered vessel as security for d'Amico's claim against the Belships-controlled operator.
It is not clear how the litigation was resolved and whether it impacts d'Amico's plans to launch London arbitration over the case. A lawyer for the shipowner declined to comment for this story.
As TradeWinds has reported, the d'Amico Group bulker subsidiary filed the lawsuit on 7 January in a charter dispute centred on the Italian company's 39,200-dwt open-hatch carrier Cielo di Monaco (built 2014).
Bangkok-headquartered Lighthouse had chartered the bulker in September to carry bulk steel to Houston.
But after it arrived at the US port, an inspection by Customs and Border Protection found an insect infestation in its dunnage — a material that is used to protect cargo in the vessel's hold.
Lighthouse was barred from unloading the dunnage in a US port and instead placed it in shipping containers that were still in the Cielo di Monaco's hold when the ship loaded cargo in the Mississippi River for its next charterer.
"In order to persuade next charterer to accept the vessel with the containers of infested dunnage stowed on board, occupying cargo space, and to allow a deviation to offload the containers on route, d’Amico agreed to lump-sum compensation of $75,000 payable to the new charterers," d'Amico's lawyers said.
The shipowner, which was represented in the case by attorneys at Rayzor, Vickery & Williams and Tisdale & Nast Law Offices, said expenses related to the infected dunnage added up to nearly $383,000, and legal costs and interest brought the total bill to $1.05m.
The effort to seize bunkers on the Seven Seas Carriers' 51,700-dwt bulker Bonas (built 2010) sought to secure 150% of that amount.
Satellite tracking data from VesselsValue shows that the open hatch carrier arrived in Texas' Galveston Bay on Sunday, but there is no indication that the judge's order to seize the fuel was carried out.
