A Greek shipowner is seeking to garnish a Singaporean charterer’s website over a bulker grounding in Africa.
Anima Shipping, the registered owner of Almi Marine Management’s 55,733-dwt Anima (built 2011), filed a lawsuit in the US federal court for Delaware on 26 August seeking to garnish Sinco Shipping’s domain name, sincoship.com.
“The website is registered with an anonymous address,” Anima said in its complaint.
“However, even if not formally held in the name of Sinco, it is Sinco’s property by information and belief given the content of the website extensively describing Sinco’s operations and Sinco’s use of emails as an essential part of its operations.”
Anima said Sinco chartered the eponymous ship to carry rice from India to the west coast of Africa in October.
The ship ran into unloading delays at Luanda and stayed there for just over three weeks in December, before sailing to Douala, Cameroon, and arriving there on 22 January.
Anima alleged that, at Douala, Sinco directed the ship into a poorly dredged channel, where it ran aground.
“It took several days, and considerable effort to refloat the vessel,” Anima said.
“Sinco wrongfully claimed that the vessel during this period went off-hire, and failed and refused to pay charter hire for those days. There were also further costs because of the grounding, including for guards, tugs, fuel, and survey expenses, which Sinco further has failed and refused to pay despite the charterparty requirement that it timely make payment.”
In a statement to TradeWinds, Sinco said the grounding was due to negligence of the master during inward pilotage.
“The owners have not only been callous about paying the dues at Douala to agents for re-floating the vessel, they have also avoided paying several other claims for which a counterclaim has been filed by Cinco seeking damages and claims from the owners,” the charterer said.
It is unclear where Sinco has filed its counterclaim.
Domain registrar GoDaddy was served with the writ of garnishment on 29 August, according to court documents.
The Anima is one of seven ships managed by Almi, which shares an Athens address with Anima Shipping.
If Anima succeeds, it would not be the first time a website was seized in a maritime case.
In 2012, Bunkers International secured an order in a federal court in Miami seizing the internet domain name panamalaw.com from Panamanian maritime law firm Carreira Pitti in a dispute.
Carreira Pitti can still be found at another internet address: carreirapitti.com.
Eric Priante Martin contributed to this story.
