Ship owner’s details not given to kin of crew

Ship owner’s details not given to kin of crew
Mansi Choksi I TNN

Mumbai: The M V Rezzak story just got murkier.

Documents procured from Lloyd’s, an agency that maintains a record of registrations on behalf of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), say Samta Shipmanagement Pte Ltd, named as the owner of the missing vessel M V Rezzak by the Black Sea MoU, and a company called Pelican Maritime Co Ltd operate from the same address in Singapore. The manning agent of the crew for M V Rezzak has a suspiciously similar-sounding name (Pelican Marines). The IMO documents say both Samta Shipmanagement Pte Ltd and Pelican Maritime Co Ltd work from 03-01, Shenton House, 3, Shenton Way, Singapore—068805. Pelican Marines director Santosh Biswas was livid at suggestions that his firm and Pelican Maritime Co Ltd could be the same organisation. “I do not know of a firm called Samta Shipmanagement Pte Ltd. The owner of the ship is 2D Shipping but I don’t have the contact details,’’ he said, assuring TOI that he could get them.

But family members of the missing crew say they have reasons to be suspicious. “The details of employers and ship owners are to be maintained by the director-general of shipping (DGS),’’ the Gazette of India (Extraordinary, part II, section 3, subsection (i), dated 2005) states. However, family members of the crew said the contract signed with manning agent Pelican Marines only mentioned the name of the owner, 2D Shipping. “Why have we not been given the contact details of the owner? We approached the DGS’s office but they have not cooperated with us. This violates the Central government Merchant Shipping Act-1958 rules,’’ V Krishnan, brother-in-law of the chief engineer of the missing vessel (Mahendra Menon), said.

Captain Saagi from the DGS refused to comment on these allegations. “We have said everything we had to in our official press statement,’’ he said. Officials from the manning agent, Pelican Marines, said that they would comment in a written reply but there was no response to the emails sent out to the company.

“The search team (looking for M V Rezzak) did not find any debris till Thursday morning. We sent a detailed letter to the DGS with vital clues on Wednesday night, which clearly established that the missing theory was a cooked-up story and an outright fraud. It is now evident that the DGS is also consciously aware that a fraud has been committed by Pelican Marines and its team of unscrupulous partners consisting of 2D shipping, Samta Shipmanagement Pte, and CMR Denizcilik ve Ticaret,’’ family members of the missing crew said in a letter sent to Manmohan Singh on Saturday.

Another ship, Jupiter 6, for which Pelican Marines recruited the crew, went missing in 2005. A case filed by family members of the missing crew is going to come up in the Supreme Court on March 25.

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