When major multinational groups in the shipping industry collapse, international trade stalls, creditors quail, maritime lawyers gloat and maritime courts around the world go into overdrive. The recent collapses, in November 2014, of OW Bunker, the world’s largest bunker fuel supplier and, in September 2016, of Hanjin Shipping, the world’s seventh-largest container carrier, generated numerous legal disputes about the recognition or status of maritime liens, the nature of a sale of consumables such as bunkers or fuel, and the circumstances in which different legal systems deal with the cross-border complexities of multinational insolvencies. In this paper, I wish to deal with aspects of issues that arise in three common and often interrelated situations involving international maritime commerce, namely, maritime liens, contracts for the sale of goods and cross-border insolvency.

Maritime law and domestic insolvency or bankruptcy law each deal with the rights of creditors to payment of their claims. Over centuries, maritime law has developed a sophisticated and generally harmonious system of dealing with cross-border insolvencies.