Recovering 14,300 EUR in Unjustified Demurrage
The shipowner charged penalties for downtime even though the quay was occupied by a privileged vessel. We proved an error in port logs.
We helped a forwarder from Szczecin avoid an unjustified demurrage fee for the vessel MV Nord Star. The case seemed lost because the shipowner had their own Statement of Facts that burdened our client.
The challenge
The client received a debit note for 14,300 EUR. The shipowner claimed the ship waited for a free quay for 38 hours due to the fault of Baltic Logistics. Traffic in the port was heavy, and the harbor master did not respond to email inquiries about entry priorities. Baltic Logistics had only 12 days to file an official objection before arbitration proceedings were triggered, which would generate additional costs of around 4,200 EUR in initial fees alone.
Our approach
We assigned Marek Wiśniewski to the case, who has been involved in logistics in the ports of Tricity and Szczecin for 7 years. Marek spent 3 business days analyzing physical entries in the port entry book and radio logs. We contacted the duty pilot directly, who handled this sector on the night of August 14-15. Plainly speaking, we were looking for a hole in the shipowner's documentation because we felt the facts at the quay looked different than in the spreadsheets from Hamburg.
The solution
We found evidence that for 22 hours of the calculated downtime, the quay was blocked by a technical unit performing emergency bottom dredging. According to the charter agreement, such time cannot be counted as demurrage for the charterer. We prepared a hard legal letter, attaching an excerpt from the harbor master's log and the pilot's statement. We held one concrete conversation with the shipowner's legal department, where only hard data mattered, not their interpretations.
Results
Thanks to the rapid collection of evidence, the shipowner withdrew the claim in full within 11 days of receiving our report. Baltic Logistics avoided the penalty and preserved its budget for subsequent port operations.
Timeline
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August 2024Analysis of charter documentation and the received debit note.
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September 2024Verification of logs at the harbor master's office and gathering witness statements.
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October 2024Sending the report to the shipowner and signing a settlement agreement to waive claims.
"Gdynia Maritime Dialogue didn't play around with theorizing. They found a specific entry in the port register that the shipowner forgot about. This saved our quarterly financial result."