Controversial shipping regulation draws wrath of SL shippers

From left: SL Shippers’ Council Vice Chairman Chrisso De Mel, Chairman Sean Van Dort, Immediate Past Chairman Dinesh De Silva, Secretariat Manori Dissanayake. Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

By Himal Kotelawala

A contentious regulation issued by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) for shippers to declare the weight of a container prior to being loaded on a vessel becomes legally effective as of today.

Circulated in 2013 as part of the IMO’s Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention, which Sri Lanka is signatory to, the regulation reads “before a packed container can be loaded onto a ship, its weight must be determined through weighing” and has drawn the ire of the local shipping fraternity. Shippers are required to submit a verified gross mass certificate to the carrier prior to rolling it on to a vessel. Some international freight forwarding companies, Daily FT learnt, have made it mandatory for shippers to submit this certificate via a web portal by paying a registration fee.

The Sri Lanka Shippers’ Council (SLSC) on Wednesday vowed to protest at the highest level internationally if steps are not taken to simplify this regulation which, it claimed, will be a burden to local shippers and antithesis to ease of doing business.

Speaking to Daily FT on the sidelines of the SLCS’s 46th annual general meeting yesterday, SLSC Chairman Sean Van Dort said that international service-providers charge different amounts, ranging from USD 25 to 50, from local shippers when submitting a container weight certificate online. This, he said, is not required, as it’s a simple process of just communicating the weight of a container.

The SLSC has been engaging the authorities on the matter, but to no avail, Van Dort told Daily FT, adding that they’re making it unnecessarily complicated by not taking the shippers’ suggestions into consideration.  Foreign service-providers whose principles are abroad, he said, are trying to make a “collection point of this.” The tolerance factor is 5% per 1 tonne of increased weight, and if a shipper so much as attempts to amend this, he or she can be charged for it, he complained.

 “We’re not for any charges, because this is a simple notification. We take the certificate at our cost and we give it to them 24 hours before the vessel’s arrival,” he added.

The SLSC seeks to have the regulation simplified.

“A majority of these charges are coming from international players. So we’re going to confront them in the best possible way to ensure that our shippers are not penalised. We have been engaging the Director Merchant Shipping, the terminals, the port, but it seems like it’s fallen on deaf ears. We have given recommendations. 

We had so many meetings with the authorities. We will continue to push,” Van Dort said speaking at the AGM.

“It is very pathetic that after so much hard work. We will protest at the highest level to ensure that our members are not held to ransom and ensure fair trade again,” he added.

Submitting the weight certificate is between shipper and consignee, an SLSC member who did not wish to be named told Daily FT. “We have given a lot of recommendations. These aren’t good enough, because that might prune the revenue earning avenues for the state regulator,” he said.