Arresting topics

WHAT makes a conference worth repeating? Is it the audience, the subject, the place, the timing or the speakers? The Ship Arrest conference has run annually for five years now and, although numbers were down slightly this year, audience involvement and participation was noticeably up. Arresting ships seems to get lawyers going.

The Fifth Annual International Forum on Ship Arrest was held at the London Tower Thistle Hotel, on December 7 and 8, 1999. So place and timing are key points. London is where people want to be in the Christmas shopping period, and there was a noticeable turnover of delegates during the two days, with strategic trips to shops taking place on what seemed to be an informal rota system.

As for the audience, many were regulars, who have come to form a loose international club of ship arrest lawyers. The remainder were users of lawyers' services from around the world, and lawyers from far-flung jurisdictions, anxious to make useful contacts.

One noticeable sector missing was the London legal community. This conference always attracted a large number of local lawyers until last year. Then Ince & Co set up and ran a case study, and numbers of London lawyers dropped off. This year Richards Butler organised a workshop session, and again the local competitors stayed away. Next year they should look for a foreign law firm to run the workshop.

Talking of workshops, here is a contradiction. For those who took part, it was the liveliest part of the conference. People enjoy interaction, informality and a chance to talk without being laughed at. Richard Harvey, senior admiralty partner at Richards Butler, set up a fiendish case study and, with an able team, drove the audience through it. All seated at round tables and working in groups, the delegates were able to share experience and ideas in a way no conventional conference can ever achieve. But many delegates chose that morning to drift in late or miss out completely. One delegate told me she slept in because of jet lag. Maybe, but it seems that fear of public performance does keep some away, which is a pity.

However, public performance was demanded of all, and all who were handed the roving mike during question sessions joined in with a will. This was no dry conference of serried rows listening to dry talks. Day one was a series of talks on jurisdictions, and an eclectic mix at that. Richard Harvey set the scene with a succinct overview of the new arrest conference. Later questioning elicited the fact that only two out of an audience of over sixty had actually read it.

Petria McDonnell, a partner with McCann Fitzgerald and leader of a strong Irish contingent at the conference, gave a spirited paper on arrests on the island of Ireland. Will the new convention change things there? No.

Louis Cassar Pullicino, of Prof JM Ganado & Associates, gave a polished overview of the business of arrest on the rather drier island of Malta. Clive Van Aerde took us through the Belgian scene, which is - on the surface - an ideal place to arrest. The question of why Holland gets all the business remains unanswered.

Lars Lewis told how the French legal system is trying to standardise things a little, but has not succeeded yet. And Thomas Bruggerman, of Hamburg-based Dres Dabelstein & Passehl, gave an unusually upbeat picture of arrest in Germany. His attitude was that the law on paper was not too helpful to arresting parities, but that, in practice, much could be done.

Nicholas Poulantzas, a professor at the University of Piraeus, gave a spirited, but confused, picture of Greek law and practice, preceded by the usual Greek history of how Greek law is the foundation of everything. He also said that if Greek law is a mess today it is the fault of the Germans, although it is not clear why. He was gently picked up on points of practice by Greek lawyers in the audience.

All of this led to the tidiest and best-planned paper of the day. The unfortunately named Freeke Kunst, who is a charming and modest but direct young woman, gave a carefully structured, informative and lively presentation on arresting in the Netherlands Antilles. It seems that Curacao is actively marketing itself as a place to arrest ships, and the port gives reduced dues to arrested vessels. Contrast that with the mother country of the Netherlands. There, port authorities are joining forces to get a national change of law which will make it much more difficult and expensive to maintain an arrest. Why? Because on any given day an astonishing 7km of quay frontage is bunged up with ships under arrest - some abandoned, all a commercial disaster for the ports. A representative from the port of Amsterdam was at the conference, along with a government legislator, to take the international arrest temperature. They want lawyers to stop stopping ships in their ports.

Day two dawned with the round table interactive workshop, which led to heated debate and a lively lunch. The afternoon was a little more bitty. Billed as a practical session, it didn't quite hit the spot. Joe Corless, of MRC Investigations, gave a clear presentation on phantom ship fraud, but failed to light up an audience which had no experience of fraud. Alida Benedetti, of Panama, gave a short account of asset tracing in the Panama Canal, pointing out that, while the main ships documents may serve to obscure more than they illuminate, declarations of health and other things to the canal authorities will often give away the real identity of owners and charterers.

Tony Caldwell, of Dynamar, started to tell tales of asset tracing, but got bogged down in confidentiality and reminiscence, and didn't light up an audience hoping to get practical tips on asset tracing. He did tell a good story of using a sprat to catch a mackerel, by putting two arrest orders on one Ukrainian ship, for either state or company ownership, and then picking up on the one that stuck. His opponent in the audience, a Dutch lawyer, called him a rude word.

This left Peter Titchener of Multiport. He told a joke, which was good, then proceeded to read out a paper which should have been about the practical role of ship agents but was actually about the rights of agents to arrest in England for unpaid debts.

Observations? No-one should come to speak without a good power point presentation. No-one should come to speak without practising and timing, and they should get their task down to twenty minutes, whatever that programme says. And no-one should turn up just to give their talk, without researching what the audience is and what it wants. That way they will avoid talking down to people who know more than they do, avoid rereading old ground and give that audience what they have paid a considerable sum to come and hear.

Next year? Same time, same place, much the same audience. But new format, and new ideas for content. Something to keep it arresting.