News / Shippers and carriers caught up in new D&D legal battles

Samsung Electronics America (SEA) and, ironically, Hapag Lloyd have both filed new detention and demurrage (D&D) cases as the issue hits the headlines again.

Last week, the US subsidiary of South Korea’s electronics giant filed for proceedings with the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) against SM Lines, claiming the Korean carrier had failed to meet contractual obligations to deliver to inland destinations in the US.

The company filed a similar complaint against Zim last autumn.

SEA claims its contract with SM Line meant the carrier was responsible for any delays to delivery of its cargo.

It alleges: “SM Line’s invoices and billing information routinely lacked adequate information to determine the basis for the individual demurrage and detention charges.”

A similar complaint was filed with the FMC last autum with SEA alleging that Zim’s refusal to accept responsibility for the inland movement of SEA’s containers, which it says were moved under ‘Store door’ waybills requiring the shipping line to arrange inland delivery, has resulted in more than 2,000 demurrage charges and 7,000 detention charges.

Meanwhile, Hapag-Lloyd, unusually, is looking to recover D&D charges of $136,500 from rail operator CSX.

As reported by The Loadstar in January, Wisconsin forwarder ME Dey had contracted Hapag-Lloyd to carry 16 containers from Antwerp to Nashville, via the port of Charleston in South Carolina.

In the first instance, ME Dey had been charged $153,000 for D&D by Hapag-Lloyd, which it waived. However, CSX had a contract with the shipping line and not the forwarder. Storage charges were mounting, according to CSX, because Hapag-Lloyd had not provided chassis to move the containers, and ME Dey’s haulier, New Age Logistics, was not allowed by CSX to mount the containers on its own chassis, as it had proposed, because the containers, “belonged to the steamship line”.

Daily calls by the forwarder and haulier to Hapag-Lloyd between last September and October failed to resolve the issue and the storage charges mounted.

ME Dey was forced to pay CSX’s D&D $136,500 charges so it could take possession of the cargo, but as the forwarder had a contract with Hapag-Lloyd, it claimed against the carrier, which is now passing the complaint on to the rail company.