> 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship
>The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment.
There is either in economy of scale that is so wildly unknown to me - or this was some shady shit to begin with.
Global use of nitrate fertilizer is in tens of millions of tons and prices are ~$200/ton. The seized fertilizer was worth only half a million dollars; I can imagine repairs on a cargo ship could easily cost more.
There is this weird "worst of all worlds" where ships aren't maintained because owners are too cheap. If they break down before they reach the destination (or get hit with unexpected port fees), the cost of the repairs can be more than the value of the ship + cargo. So the owner just stops answering the phone (or rather the untraceable faceless fake corporation in a tax haven jurisdiction does).
Then the crew are stuck: they won't get paid. But the port the ship is in won't let them leave with the ship without paying the fees, which they can't. And they aren't allowed to leave without the ship (and fly home or whatever) because the authorises don't want the ship to just sit there rusting or sink.
That's what happened here. It can go on for decades.
The issue here was that the courts said the cargo couldn't be seized as no one knew who the owner was in order to sue. So it just had to be stored forever. For some crazy reason they also refused to allow it to be moved out of the highly populated, busy port city. Not sure why that was...
It's apparently quite common for this crap to happen and no one really cares. The big losers are crews. The winners are consumers getting a few nano percent less in shipping costs...
The dirty secret is that shipping is a rarely profitable industry, so the "owners are too cheap" aspect is really the owners trying to go out of business as slowly as possible, hoping that times will improve in the future: if the shipping company goes out of business, it cares not one bit for the maintenance state of its fleet.
So what do you do if you're a country that doesn't want this to happen? Well, we tried regulating how international shippers operate, and it turns out that it's expensive to do that. So we ended up with flags of convenience.
It'd be easy to think that you could say "well, you need to be well-maintained, etc., etc., in order to dock at and use our country's ports" -- but that doesn't work either. There's no global inspection regime to make sure the ship is in good repair when it leaves the last port (and it can break down on the passage so that the only place it can be repaired to move again is at the same port you'd like to prevent it from using).
You also can't be too heavy-handed about the whole thing, because shipping is pretty essential to the operation of industrialized countries, and if too many shippers were to be driven out of business the result might likely be worse than the current status quo.
Because of reverse splits, the stock appears to have peaked at around $1.5B per share in late 2007. If you multiply that by the shares now outstanding you get about $130 trillion. Which of course it was never worth.
They kept issuing shares and getting asymptotically closer to zero, but I'm not sure they ever actually went out of business.
that consumers get things for slightly cheaper seems like a side-effect. The winners would be the owners of the vessel who have done the X vs Y math, and enjoy the extra money from having done so.
But then they'd charge more, and I'd have to pay 3p more a pointless plastic waste off amazon and that's fundamentally unacceptable to our democratic capitalist mess of a society.
2754 tonnes is not really considered a large amount of material on the scale of global logistics. That's even closer to "regular weekly/monthly delivery" numbers than a large or special shipment.
>The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment.
There is either in economy of scale that is so wildly unknown to me - or this was some shady shit to begin with.