Osmium Shipping Corporation Vs. Cargill International SA: Case Study

For this case, there were involved two parties which are Osmium Shipping Corporation and Cargill International SA (The “Captain Stefanos”). Cargill International SA is the defendant and also the charter of this case; Osmium Shipping Corporation is the claimant and ship owner of this case.

For the fact of this case, the ship owner and charterer entered into a charterparty on an amended NYPE (1946) form dated 28 August 2011 in respect of the Panamax bulk carrier "Captain Stefanos". The vessel undertook the voyage from from South Africa to continent/Mediterranean (intention Italy). The charterer send the voyage order to owner which the order content about transported the cargo of coal from Richards Bay, South Africa to Brindisi, Italy and also

The view of owner is those words were qualified by the further words "by any authority" and that pirates did not constitute such an authority. In contrast, the charterer submitted that "capture/seizure" was unqualified and a seizure by pirates was an off-hire event. The two parties agreed on the principles to be applied in construing the charterparty . First, the hire is payable continuously unless Charterers can bring themselves within an exception, the onus being on the Charterers to do so. Then, doubt as to the meaning of exceptions is to be resolved in favour of Owners. Otherwise, the approach is to look at the words used in the clause in question and to construe them in the context of the clause itself and the charterparty as a whole. Furthermore, about the point of placed the risk of piracy upon Charterers and that the off-hire clause had to allocated the risk among the two parties. The judge though that disputation between the owner and charterer due to the meaning of the language used, so he thought that the use of the word "or", the linkage of "capture" with "seizure" by the use of an oblique stroke, and the positioning of the commas, the clause clearly set out.

For the judgement of the judge, he dismissed the assertion of the owner because charterers ' construction did not turn simply on a comma but upon the whole language of the off-hire clause, its grammatical form and the usage of the word "or" throughout it, in a purposeful manner. The comma was significant but Owners’ construction ignored