By Jonathan Rostron , Partner

Introduction
South Korea is a major trading nation with a large merchant fleet. It also has a significant ship-building capacity. Vessels with either Korean flags or foreign flags are often threatened with arrest in South Korea with the purpose of securing claims arising out of ship mortgages, ship collision, bills of lading, charterparties, cargo loss, ship building contracts and so on. We discuss below the criteria which an arresting party must satisfy to arrest a ship in South Korea and the procedural hoops a claimant must go through.

By Jonathan Rostron, Partner

Two masters and two pilots involved in Hong Kong’s worst maritime disaster since 1971 were jailed on 15th January 2010 for between 2 years 4 months and 3 years 2 months on charges related to endangering life at sea. They had all pleaded not guilty.

By Jonathan Rostron, Partner

On 16th October 2009, the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit issued a judgment that sounded the death knell of the "Rule B attachment" phenomenon by reversing the 2002 "Winter Storm" decision which allowed the attachment in maritime claims of a defendant's US dollar Electronic Funds Transfers (EFTs) through New York Banks.