by Nick Elliott
Zoe brought me a fresh cup of Nescafé, which always tastes a good deal better in Greece than it does in the UK for reasons I’ve never understood, and I started going through the files.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. These cases can take on a personality of their own, especially the long and difficult ones, but for some reason I couldn’t help thinking there were similarities between this and the other file on my desk – that of the Sophia M.
Zoe had titled the current file according to the Club’s case-naming protocol: ‘Sophia M – Misappropriation of freight – Kosichang/Lagos.’ Again the charterparty date had been added.
The charterparty, or contract of hire, was often my starting point with these cases, just to understand what kind of voyage the owner had agreed to in the first place.
The Med Runner had been on a regular liner run carrying containers between North Europe and the East Med and Black Sea whilst the Sophia M was carrying bagged rice from Thailand to Lagos, so on the face of it the two cases couldn’t be more different. But. And there was a ‘but’. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
The Med Runner had performed just one single voyage for the Med Black Sea Container Line, under a voyage charterparty. And that was rather unusual in itself. Normally I would have expected such a ship either to belong to the line itself or at least be hired on timecharter for a fixed period – six months or more, or for a fixed number of voyages. But a single voyage? It wasn’t impossible, just a little unusual.
But in looking for hard evidence of a connection to back my hunch I was in danger of clutching at straws. In the end all I got was that flood of memories, not least of the night in Istanbul with the amorous Claire. For a moment I pictured her swaying seductively on the dance floor as she emulated the sensuous movements of the danse du ventre. She’d had a relaxed, fluid style which came naturally to her.
I refocused and spent the best part of two hours going through both case files. If there were similarities they had more to do with style than substance, and as lunchtime approached I gave up, pushed them both aside and went out onto the sweltering, noisy bustle of the Piraeus waterfront to meet the owner of the Sophia M, Christos Mavritis.
CHAPTER 2
The Taverna Naval, better known as Nikos’, was set back from Marina Zea up a side street halfway between the area I lived in and the office. Nikos Vassilopoulos was a marine engineer and still frequently vanished from his taverna, heading off with a riding squad to carry out urgent repairs on one or other of his clients’ ships. Nikos would go wherever his skills were needed, wherever some ageing Greek vessel was struggling with engine trouble that needed more know-how to fix than the ship’s engineers had. It was called breakdown maintenance.
The place was festooned with nautical memorabilia gathered from his travels and from the dusty old chandlery shops that used to pepper the back streets of Piraeus; everything from huge cargo lights to a ship’s binnacle. Anywhere else it would have looked trite but here it belonged.
Christos and I often met here. Nikos’ wife did most of the cooking. Their seafood was as good as any you’d find in Greece but she did other dishes too, and I’d usually go into the kitchen to see what was cooking on the day and have a chat.
By the time I’d walked over there my shirt was sticking to my back and I was ready for a drink. Christos, to my surprise, was already seated under the canopy outside with a large jug of iced water and a litre of wine in a red aluminium pitcher on the table.
Christos’ idea of punctuality followed the traditional Greek notion that anything up to half an hour or so late would do. Once you’d adjusted to this habit you could learn to live with it, even embrace it. Many foreigners never did.
‘What’s up, Christo?’ I asked, only partially feigning shock at his change of custom. But it wasn’t the right moment for facetious remarks.
‘Ella, Gus, you know what’s up.’ His tone was anxious. ‘Just sit down and we discuss what to do.’
I pulled out a chair and sat facing in towards the taverna with my back to the late summer glare while Christos poured water and wine.
In his capacity as owner of the Sophia M and half a dozen other ageing Handysize bulkers, Christos was also a member and director of the Caledonian Marine Mutual. Furthermore, he was the reason I’d settled in Greece, for better or worse, in the first place. I had served on his ships for two or three years as bosun and when I’d come ashore Christos had given me freelance work as his claims handler before I’d fallen in with the CMM.
Christos was short and thickset, in his mid-fifties and with a full head of grey hair cropped close to his skull. He radiated a restless, impatient energy, his hands and arms constantly moving to add emphasis to what he was saying.
‘Begin at the beginning, Christo. Tell me about this dodgy fixture you made.’
‘It wasn’t dodgy,’ he said irritably. ‘At least, we didn’t think so at the time. We ran the usual checks – the charterer’s bank, talked to the broker, other owners, the shippers and consignees – it all checked out, this Universal Agriprods, they looked like first-class charterers.’
I wasn’t convinced he’d done anything of the kind but I didn’t labour the point. Perhaps he’d told one of his offspring who worked in the office to run some checks and they’d done so cursorily, which was thought to be good enough. Christos was the kind of Greek owner who operated largely on gut feel: a canny combination of instinct and intuition. And this time he’d got it wrong. Over-eager to fix his old ship with anything that would help get her back in position for the next cargo, this was classic, old-style tramping – and in difficult times you took your chances or faced lay-up, or the breaker’s yard.
‘You know what’s happened, Gus, so let’s get on with it. What do we do now?’
The xifias arrived. He tore off a piece of bread, dipped it into the olive oil at the bottom of the horiatiki salad and washed it down with wine before tackling the swordfish. Now that he’d passed the problem on to me he could get on and enjoy his meal.
The scam was one of the oldest in the book. In its simplest form the owner would timecharter his ship to the charterer, who would pay the shipowner fifteen days’ charter hire up front to ensure the vessel was delivered to the load port ready to commence loading. Meanwhile, said charterer would sub-let the ship on a single voyage basis to an unwitting cargo owner, in this case the shipper, on a freight pre-paid basis. The freight here was sixty-three dollars a ton and she’d loaded just over twenty-eight thousand tons of rice. So with close to one point eight million in his account against an initial outlay of two hundred and twenty-five thousand – the fifteen days’ charter hire – the fraudulent charterer had walked off with over a million and a half dollars in his pocket, leaving the shipowner and the shipper facing each other, the former wondering how he was going to complete the forty-five day voyage having received only fifteen days’ charter hire, and the latter wondering how he was ever going to deliver his cargo to Lagos when it was sweating away out at an anchorage in Singapore Roads with a lien slapped on it.
There were plenty of nuances to the case but that was the essence of it, and I was still scratching my head over how Christos could have fallen for such a trick when he got to the point. ‘Can you get out there, Gus and find the bastards?’
By ‘there’ he meant Bangkok – or the anchorage off Kosichang more precisely – where the Sophia M had loaded, and Singapore, where the skipper was anxiously awaiting orders and worrying that the rice was beginning to sweat and deteriorate due to inadequate ventilation of the holds.
Which was where the CMM came in, maybe.
‘Well, we’ll have to see …’ I began.
‘Am I covered?’ he asked in an exasperated tone. Christos knew as well as I that we couldn’t answer that yes or no. The shipowner, up to a point, was covered for such fraudulent events, or certainly the cost of investigating them and the subsequent legal expenses – up to a point and subject to having exercised all reasonable care and
diligence. I was by no means certain of that but Christos was Christos – a valued member and director of the Club as well as a friend in need. I didn’t worry whether I would be paid for my time one way or another. Even if the Club had to reject the claim, Christos was good for the money and right now time wasn’t on his side.
So I agreed to head ‘out there’ and see if I could at least find a trail. It wasn’t easy to just vanish into thin air these days but that was what this lot seemed to have done. Preliminary checks by both Christos and the Club back in Leith had so far turned up nothing.
‘Eh!’ Christos shrugged, still reluctant to admit he’d got it wrong. ‘I’ve fixed similar cargoes a dozen times before without trouble, so why now? These criminals must be stopped, Gus, before other owners are trapped like this.’
I smiled at this sudden show of compassion. In the world of Greek shipowning you didn’t survive long by considering the feelings of your peers, but I let it go. What I didn’t do was share with Christos my suspicions of a link between this case and the Med Runner. The connection, if there actually was one, was still too tenuous.
We talked through the case in more detail, particularly the prospects of finding the fraudsters and, if I did find them, what I was expected to do about it. The Club’s remit was clear and limited. Gather the facts, examine the law, but don’t go chasing after the crooks. Claire Scott had learned that lesson the hard way.
***
By the time I’d walked back to the office I was sweating. The air-conditioner was rattling away as usual, but it worked, just. Zoe came through with coffee and a jug of iced water.
‘I don’t understand what has happened in this case,’ she said, tapping a bright red finger nail on the Sophia M file. ‘Tell me, Angus. I must learn.’
‘Right, Zoe. Sit down and have your coffee with me and we’ll run through it,’ I said. ‘As you know, in this case the shipper is the cargo owner and seller, and the consignee is the receiver and buyer.
‘Now, the timecharterer, and remember he is the fraudster this time, is the party who timechartered the ship from Christos, and then voyage chartered to the shipper, the cargo owner. To give you an analogy, think of him as the tenant who then becomes a landlord when he sub-lets to another tenant.’
‘Ella, Angus. All of this I understand. I don’t sit around painting my nails all the time you know!’
‘Okay, so, the analogy. You own a little shop downstairs, right? You let it out to Kostas for one year and he pays you two months’ rent in advance – two thousand euros. You’re happy, yes?’
‘Yes,’ she hesitated. ‘I think so.’
‘Right, now Kostas sublets your shop to Maria, who wants to open a shoe shop. So Kostas says to Maria, “You can carry your stock of shoes in my shop but instead of paying me rent you must pay me something for each pair of shoes you carry in your stock, and you must pay me in advance.” Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Zoe, ‘but why doesn’t Kostas just charge Maria a monthly rent?’
‘The fraud wouldn’t work if he did that. Anyway, in shipping the shipowner either charges for renting out the whole ship – a timecharter – or for just the cargo space for one voyage from A to B – a voyage charter. So with the Sophia M, the shipowner timechartered the ship to our fraudster, who then “sublet” her to his consignee on a voyage charter.
‘Now, let’s say Maria has paid Kostas ten thousand euros in advance as his “commission” on her stock, but Kostas has only paid you two thousand euros advance rent. He then vanishes having cleared eight thousand euros’ profit, moving on to repeat the same trick elsewhere. And in our business, by using dummy companies and moving from country to country, you can get away with this kind of fraud, at least for a while.’
‘Okay, but going back to my shop, I can work something out with Maria I’m sure.’
‘Maybe, but remember she’s already paid Kostas for carrying her stock in “his” shop so she’ll not be keen to pay you anything as well. The best you can both hope for is to work out a deal to split your losses and trade your way out of the problem, but don’t expect to come out of it with a profit, either of you.’
‘Oh,’ said Zoe, taking a thoughtful sip of her coffee. ‘I see the problem.’
‘Yes, a problem for you and Maria, but not for Kostas. And imagine if this were being done on a grand scale across the world. A tidy little business, don’t you think, Zoe?’
A tidy little business, and you’d need a tidy little organisation to pull it off, I thought to myself.
‘Angus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you choose shoes?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Why not books or, I don’t know, cameras?’
‘Well, I just thought …’
‘Never mind, but I’m not just a pretty pair of shoes, Angus.’
‘I know. The ones you’re wearing must have put the idea into my head,’ I confessed, looking down at her bright red, patent leather platform-soled shoes, which must have added a good five inches to her height.
‘Some men find shoes a real turn-on you know.’ She looked at me brightly, expecting a response.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s called a fetish and it’s a psychosexual disorder.’
She giggled, swept up the coffee tray and sashayed out of the room.
CHAPTER 3
With its flowery flyovers, shiny cars and well-mannered natives, it’s easy to feel that all is as it should be in Singapore. The jungle, what’s left of it, has been tamed, even the heat doesn’t seem as fierce as elsewhere in the tropics. An illusion perhaps but most would agree that the city state’s founding fathers, from Stamford Raffles to Lee Kwan Yew, had realised their dreams with spectacular success.
Container terminals vie for waterfront space with office blocks and hotels; and out at the anchorages lie hundreds of ships – each with their own reason for being there, whether wholly legitimate or not. One of them was the Sophia M.
Before I’d left Greece, CMM had told me they were minded to support a claim by Christos’ company, Mavritis Maritime, under the terms of the Club’s Freight, Demurrage & Defence cover. With this in mind I’d notified their Singapore Correspondent, Manish Chavan. I would manage the claim but he would be better placed to follow up on anything we learned either in Kosichang or here in Singapore.
I’d first run into Manish twenty years ago. He’d been sent to Mogadishu to supervise the discharge of an aid cargo; a considerable amount of the grain had been pilfered from the warehouse to be sold on the black market. A cargo claim ensued and in going through the claim documents later I’d come across his expense account from the trip. It included the purchase of a second-hand AK-47 assault rifle, price two hundred and seventy-five dollars. I’d interviewed him later in his Cairo office. ‘What did you expect?’ he’d laughed. ‘Mogadishu isn’t the kind of place you want to be caught unprepared. And your cargo claim would be a damned sight more if I hadn’t had that gun.’
Sometime afterwards he’d been rewarded with a posting to Singapore, where fortuitously the ships agency he worked for was also the Club’s correspondent. But Manish still missed the excitement of Africa, not to mention his earlier career in the Indian Army’s Para Commandos.
‘So, what mess do you want me to sort out this time?’ We were in his office overlooking Tanjong Pagar Container Terminal.
‘It concerns the mysterious case of the good ship Sophia M,’ I said narrowing my eyes.
‘Aha! I do like your mysterious cases, Sherlock. Tell me.’
I ran through it with him and by the time I’d finished and he’d organised a launch, the sky had darkened and heavy droplets of rain were heralding Singapore’s late-afternoon theatrical performance – the tropical storm.
We took the launch from the West Coast Pier out to the anchorage, the rain beating down so hard on the cabin roof as to drown out the engine noise. We had to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.
With a hundred and forty thousand ship ca
lls a year, Singapore is probably the world’s busiest port, depending how you measure these things. Just finding the Sophia M was a task in itself, but by the time we did the storm was spent, the sky had cleared and there was a fresh breeze blowing in from the west.
The Sophia M was twenty-seven years old and, sitting at anchor out there, she looked it. I hadn’t expected otherwise. With three previous owners and a trading history embracing everything from winter storms in the North Atlantic to the fierce sun of the tropics, she’d carried cargoes ranging from bulk salt to heavy machinery and everything in between. The ship was nearing the end of her working life with maintenance costs no doubt edging towards unsustainable levels. Even the best-maintained vessel will show the effects of such hardships and the Sophia M did not fit into that category.
‘See where the corrosion’s coming through the boot topping. I could poke my finger through that,’ Manish grumbled as we climbed the gangway from the launch. ‘Shell plating’s wearing a bit thin if you ask me.’
‘Rubbish, she passed her Special Survey only a year ago,’ I said, unsure why I was defending Mavritis and his old tub. ‘She’s good for a few more years yet.’
Inside, the accommodation block was the usual unadorned blend of steel bulkheads coated in layers of cream paint and a thin film of grease, laminate panels and shabby curtain fabrics all set off by overly bright lighting. The hum of generators and air-conditioning units added to the perception that on a workhorse such as this, form strictly followed function.
The same could be said of the skipper. Captain Adam Tomic was a dour Croat who had been with Mavritis for twelve years or so. Neatly dressed in his well-pressed khaki uniform, he had the air of a dependable if unimaginative officer.
He knew we were coming and why. The plan was to spend the night on board and get started first thing the next morning. Since everyone was preoccupied with the dilemma the ship was in, it was tempting to open up a discussion about the case over dinner in the officers’ dining saloon that night but I steered the conversation off the subject preferring to address it one-to-one with Tomic in the morning.