As many as 60% to 80% of ship owners are in favour of arming their vessels even though the cost can be as high as $50,000 per passage, a leading Danish ship owner has claimed.
“We took the decision three to four months ago that we could not defend our ships without contracting-in armed guards with light machine guns and who will shoot back,” said Per Gullestrup, CEO & Partner of Clipper Ferries/Ro-Ro.
“I hear that 60% to 80% of owners are in favour of arming their ships, which is a lot, and if you figure out that every time you do, it costs an owner between $30K and $50K to put armed guards on each passage then you are talking about a lot of money,” he said.
Mr Gullestrup has built up first hand knowledge of dealing with pirates after he negotiated with Somali pirates over the release of the CEC Future back in 2008. Pirates held the CEC Future for 71 days, and only released the ship after negotiations and the payment of a ransom of nearly DKK 9 million.
Per Gullestrup was heavily involved in negotiating with the pirates in 2008. A Somali pirate now faces a 25 year prison sentence in the US after he was convicted. “Despair is a good word,” to describe the way ship owners feel about the whole piracy issue, he told SMI.
“It is a hard word but there are times in a quiet moment when you say, look what is going on here. It is 2011 and we are five years into this and we are still being run around by a bunch of criminals because that is all they are – extortionists, murderers and criminals. And even the largest naval powers in the world haven’t been able to do anything about it and they won’t until we do something fundamentally ashore in Somalia. Until then, we will not solve this problem,” he said.
“We now have the monsoon season and this will have a strong reflection on the level of activities going on. But even when the monsoon settles down, I suspect you will see a lot of the ships being armed now. But what will that do to the equation? Hopefully it will put a dampener on activities but it won’t solve anything. Because the pirates might start to lose too much money and the investors will stop getting the returns they want, they will retrench and ease off. The naval forces will then say the situation is better and the pirates will be back in action and we will be back where we started. We as ship owners are very frustrated. If this kind of criminal activity happened anywhere else on this scale something would have been done about it but 94% of the seafarers involved in this are from developing countries and that is the reason. If the 94% of seafarers were from Europe or the US, I guarantee we would not have been talking about it now. It is a disgrace,” he added.
