Seacor Marine has filed a lawsuit against Louisiana broking firm Gulf Offshore Logistics in a bid to chase charter bills that remained unpaid following the bankruptcy of an oil producer.
The US offshore vessel owner’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against GOL came roughly 17 months after creditors pushed Texas oil company Cox Operating into bankruptcy.
In court papers, New York-listed Seacor Marine alleged that it is owed $2.7m from Cox, and it believes that some of that was covered by the oil company’s agreement to pay $13m to GOL as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case.
GOL, which has yet to file its official response to the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to TradeWinds’ request for comment on the allegations.
Seacor Marine, which is led by chief executive John Gellert, struck a deal in May 2018 with the broker to obtain charters for its vessels.
Some of those were chartered to Cox, which stopped paying even before its bankruptcy began.
Cox’s bankruptcy started as an involuntary Chapter 7 liquidation launched by creditors before the case was converted into a Chapter 11 restructuring.
Seacor Marine’s lawyers, Gary Hemphill and Arthur Kraatz at New Orleans law firm Phelps Dunbar, wrote in court papers that Cox is in the process of being liquidated.
They said that the brokerage agreement with GOL required the Raceland-headquartered firm to “undertake all reasonable efforts” to collect charter hire from the oil company.
“To date, GOL has not paid Seacor any portion of the amounts due to Seacor by Cox,” Hemphill and Krattz told the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
“GOL’s failure to pay such sums to Seacor constitutes a breach of its contractual obligation to use ‘all reasonable efforts’ to collect the amounts due to Seacor.”
They also accused GOL of failing to provide an accounting of its dealings with Cox.
GOL, which focuses on brokering offshore vessel charters on the Gulf of Mexico, was created in 2003 out of the joining of Joel Broussard’s JNB Operating with the business interests of the Danos family.
Seacor Marine, which spun off from Fort Lauderdale maritime conglomerate Seacor Holdings in 2017, owns 146 offshore vessels.
