Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
WILL LLMC APPLY TO REMOTE CONTROL CENTRE OPERATORS?
Mayank Suri*
The Stema Barge II
The first line of defence for a shipping entity facing potentially successful claims against it is the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims 1976, familiarly known as “LLMC”.1 LLMC provides specific shipping entities with the right to prevent their liability, in respect of specified shipping claims, from going beyond certain internationally recognised limits. There are two special classes of shipping entity: shipowners and salvors.2 We are concerned with the first class, ie, shipowners. The term “shipowner” refers to a multitude of parties within the labyrinth of commercial shipping, as is borne out by the case under discussion. In fact, claims often fail for the non-joinder of the correct
* Research Fellow, Centre for Maritime Law, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, India. The author is grateful to Professor Rose and an anonymous referee for their comments. While this Comment was in the press, the decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal [2021] EWCA Civ 188, a Comment on the judgment of which will be published in a following issue of this journal.
* Barrister, 7 King’s Bench Walk, London.
1. LLMC is enacted into UK law by the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, s.185 and Sch.7. See generally AM Tettenborn and FD Rose, Admiralty Claims (London, 2020), ch.7, esp. [7.050].
2. LLMC, Art.1 (“Persons entitled to limit liability”).
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