Practice and law of international ship finance

Maruno, Yo (1978) Practice and law of international ship finance. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The shipping industry has gone through a period of considrable change in the lest ten years. The rapid increase of ship size and the growing specialisation characteristic of modern shipping have contributed to make modern ship finance more difficult than ever before. The modern ship finance is a highly specialised finance, demanding expert knowledge and more flexible approaches than is commonly found in most other industries.Finance is needed at all stages of a ship's life, but finance for new ship-building is the most important. Since great values are involved in ship finance for new ship-building, even a slight degree of legal uncertainty is a great evil. Therefore, the possibilities of giving the tripartite constellation of the ship-builder, ship financier and shipowner better legal tools to work with should be explored.On the other hand, the two main securities in ship finance are (1) the asset protection by ship mortgages and (2) the cash-flow protection by charter-hire monies. However, the former has been eroded by the sharp decline of ship's value and the latter has been frequently undermined by default of charterer. Therefore, more sophistication in ship finance is necessary in such a way as to achieve reasonable predictability and security. The thesis examines the possibilities of advanced and sophisticated ship finance methods in view of the diversified and complicated structure of ship finance connecting to widely different legal and fiscal regimes.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics