The Maritime Advocate online--Issue 446
Posted on Friday, July 30 @ 09:44:36 CDT by Editors
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IN THIS ISSUE
1. FOB Network
2. Single Bill of Lading--Carmack Amendment on the Slide
3. UK Shipping Companies could Benefit from new Double Taxation Treaty Passport Scheme
4. Freight Broker Liabilities in the USA
5. Four Easy Steps to Better Email
6. People and Places
1. FOB Network
We are pleased to report that following our announcement last week of the launch of FOB, the network aimed at readers of the Maritime Advocate, some 225 people have signed up. First impressions of the kinds of people signing up are that many more than we anticipated are above the age of the facebook generation (we thought there would be a threshold at around the age of 35 or so). Also many businesses showed us some support by taking out a business page for a small fee--after 6 months of development costs, these are certainly welcome. For individuals FOB is free to use.
There is apparent a certain caginess. After years of receiving curiously uninformative invitations to join Linkin, Plaxo or some other network, people are concerned whether membership of FOB will expose them to spam and more hard sellers. We have tried to anticipate this by designing our system to provide people with an overview. Unregistered browsers can only see the home page. Each individual can assemble as small or as large a list of contacts as he or she desires. People can invite others to join and they must approve anyone who wishes to be their contact. We are firmly discouraging the mickeymouse@hotmail.com type of registered member. In a place where we hope conversation, debate, criticism and light moments are shared, we do think it is important that we discourage the flaming, abuse and anonymous contributors which sometimes disfigures life on the internet..
In publishing terms, our new platform is wonderfully flexible--it gives us many more possibilities for running good stories, good writing and the good humour which somehow distinguishes our readers and their ways of life.
So dear readers, please continue signing up. We anticipate the network will consist of thousands by the time the site has matured. The basic building blocks of FOB are People (for whom you can search under many aspects), Groups which are organised into subjects of appeal to specific groups of people and Businesses, which are the basic supporters of the effort. If you are interested in forming a group we will be glad to hear from you. Would be sponsors of the Groups are also highly welcome. The firms who agreed to sponsor us during our development period, based on a presentation of story boards and site mock ups, we prize mightily. Led by launch sponsors Colemont Insurance Brokers, they are George Chalos, ESSDocs, OAMPS Special Risks, Unit One Art Storage and Real Corporate Travel.
Register for FOB by clicking on the link below:-
http://www.fobnetworking.com
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2. Single Bill of Lading--Carmack Amendment on the Slide
From the newsletter of the tireless Dennis Bryant comes a note of another swing away from the applicability of the Carmack Amendment to shipments under through bills of lading. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit followed the recent Supreme Court ruling and abandoned its previous decisions, now holding that the Carmack Amendment does not apply to a shipment originating overseas under a single through bill of lading. Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance v. Ocean World Lines, No. 08-4324-cv (2nd Cir., July 20, 2010).
Read the decision here:-
http://tinyurl.com/throughbill
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3. UK Shipping Companies could Benefit from new Double Taxation Treaty Passport Scheme
Chris Hewer writes:-
Accountant and shipping industry adviser Moore Stephens says UK-based companies in the shipping sector which negotiate loans with overseas corporate lenders could benefit from a new Double Taxation Treaty Passport (DTTP) scheme recently introduced by the UK government.
Sue Bill, a tax partner with Moore Stephens, explains, “Under the new scheme, which comes into operation on 1 September 2010, an overseas lender in a country with which the UK has a double tax treaty can apply for a DTTP. If this is granted, the passport holder will be entered onto a publicly available website with its unique DTTP number. The UK-resident corporate borrower can then verify the lender’s status on line, and thereafter apply the treaty rate of withholding tax from the start of the loan, relying on the lender’s passport status.
“When UK borrowers enter into a loan agreement with a lender registered as a Treaty Passport Holder, the lender will notify them of its passport holder status and reference number. The UK borrower must then notify Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) within thirty days of the passported loan. Therefore, if a company is taking out a loan from an overseas bank or other lender, it should find out whether the lender is a passport holder and, if it is, notify HMRC within thirty days of the making of the passported loan.”
Previously, where a UK borrower paid interest to a non-UK resident lender, it was required to deduct withholding tax from the interest at twenty per cent and pay it to HMRC. Although the withholding tax liability could be reduced or eliminated if there was a suitable double tax treaty in place, advance clearance had to be obtained before any interest payments were made in order to prevent withholding tax liabilities arising – a potentially time-consuming process.
The previous rules did not apply where interest was paid to a UK bank or to the UK branch of an overseas bank and this continues to be the case.
sue.bill@moorestephens.com
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4 . Freight Broker Liabilities in the USA
From Michael McDaniel's s Cargo Letter comes word of a case which will cast light on the legal exposures of a race of transport intermediaries somewhat peculiar to the US called freight brokers. In RLI Insurance Company v. All Star Transportation, Inc. issues of liability are before the U.S. Court of Appeals, (DC Circuit, Case No. 09-7027 22JUN10). McDaniel writes:-
The trucking industry consists of three main players: (i) shippers, who typically are manufacturers sending goods to retailers or others; (ii) truckers, who transport the goods; and (iii) brokers, who act as intermediaries between shippers & truckers. When a shipper needs to send goods, it hires a broker. The broker arranges for shipment by finding a trucker to transport the goods. The broker receives money from the shipper and, after taking a cut for itself, pays the trucker. The problem at the root of this case is that the broker sometimes fails to pay the trucker. To protect the trucker, a 4th player is brought in – the surety. Federal regulations require brokers to obtain a surety bond – akin to a guarantee – in the amount of US$10,000. Therefore, if a broker does not pay a trucker, the surety does so, at least up to US$10,000.
This case involves Sam's Transportation Services, a broker that went into bankruptcy. Sam's maintained a surety bond with RLI Insurance Company, a surety. The face value of the bond was US$10,000. Because of Sam's pending insolvency, Sam's failed to pay numerous truckers that it owed. Some of the truckers filed claims with RLI to recover payment under the surety bond. RLI refused to pay more than a total of US$10,000 and instituted an interpleader action in court. The truckers assert that, under the bond, RLI must pay up to US$10,000 on each claim. RLI counters that it need only pay US$10,000 total for all claims combined. The court agreed with RLI, and therefore affirmed the judgment of the District Court.
http://www.cargolaw.com
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5. Four Easy Steps to Better Email
David Cummings, who is a droll Australian humourist, realised one of his ambitions by appearing in the Heckler column in the Sydney Morning Herald on 26JLY10. A friend of Frazer Hunt, Cummings has been a fertile source of arresting one liners and quips for the maritime classes for many a year. Here are his thoughts:-
Email came upon us quickly. One minute we were sprinting to the letter box to catch the last post and suddenly it was fingers flashing across the keyboard and the click of a mouse.
Hanging on for the postman to deliver something became a thing of the past, except when waiting for all the many goodies we had bought on eBay.
But there has been no time to establish a set of manners. We learnt as we went and picked up some bad habits along the way. So to my email correspondents I make a few simple requests:
Please do not reply to my email with the same title in the subject box. Since I wrote three weeks ago about fingernails and we are now discussing apricots, don't send me the apricot email with ''fingernails'' in the title. It takes 10 seconds to type a new subject and then I don't get what I wrote coming back like a homing pigeon.
Do not leave my email to you lying there under your reply. Even worse, sometimes I get emails with all the correspondence on the topic from four people over the past three months.
When you are sending me a cute picture of a pussycat playing the bagpipes, I would like it even more if you didn't include the 42 people that the person who sent it to you sent it to. And when you are forwarding something, it takes only a couple of clicks to take out ''Fwd'' in the subject box. That way I feel the email is meant for me and not for Ada from Leicester or Twinkletoes from Hornsby.
I don't care how important you think your company is, do not send me a disclaimer that tells me what to do with your email. When you say, ''If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately then delete it'', my reaction is to forward it to a bunch of people who would really love to know your innermost secrets. And then you lecture me about considering the environment before printing the email. I will decide how it is reproduced and by what method it gets there.
Email is very useful. Sure, it sometimes results in a long, arduous exchange of information that could have been dealt with in one quick phone call. But mostly it is the greatest thing since you-know-what. But a little courtesy would not go astray. And if the courtesy does go astray, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it.
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6. People and Places
Cozen O’Connor has announced that is has expanded its Washington, D.C., office with the addition of 15 lawyers and government affairs professionals from Sher & Blackwell, LLP, an international transportation and government affairs law firm. The Sher & Blackwell team will join Cozen O’Connor on 01SEP10.
Sher & Blackwell is known, inter alia, for its industry experience in international and domestic maritime, intermodal transportation, offshore energy, and aviation. Sher & Blackwell partners Mark Atwood, Marc Fink, Jeffrey Lawrence, Anne Mickey, Stanley Sher, and David Smith, along with nine other lawyers and government relations professionals, will be joining Cozen O’Connor in its Washington D.C., office.
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Proper Pirates
A sailor meets a pirate in a bar....
A sailor meets a pirate in a bar. The pirate has a peg leg, a hook, and an eye patch.
"How'd you end up with a peg leg?" asks the sailor.
"I was swept overboard in a storm," says the pirate. "A shark bit off me whole leg."
"Wow!" said the sailor. "What about the hook?"
"We were boarding an enemy ship, battling the other seamen with swords. One of them cut me hand clean off."
"Incredible!" remarked the sailor. "And the eye patch?"
"A seagull dropping fell in me eye," replied the pirate.
"You lost your eye to a seagull dropping?" the sailor asked incredulously.
Said the pirate, "It was me first day with the hook."
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Good Old Boys Haiku
Offerings
Tonight we hunger
Grandma sent grocery money
To Jimmy Swaggert
Beauty
Naked in repose
Silvery silhouette girls
Adorn my mudflaps
Remorse
A painful sadness
Can't fit big screen TV through
Double-wide's front door
Options
Unemployment's out.
Hey, maybe I can get on
Disability
Blaze
Distant sirens scream
Dumb-ass Verne's been playing
With gasoline again
Desire
Damn, in that tube-top
You make me almost forget
That you are my cousin
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