Surcharge moratorium continues past March 15 deadline

Alan Peat
THE LINES were officially silent up to FTW's print deadline (Monday March 18) on what was happening with the port congestion surcharge after the moratorium expiry date of March 15 had come and gone.
So silent, in fact, that even the lines' customer base - the forwarding and shipping communities - was also left in blissful ignorance after the expiry of the March 15 deadline.
Unofficially, all that FTW could glean from the SA shipping community - and its mouthpiece,
the Container Liner Operators' Forum (Clof) - was that the exchanges between the lines and the London-based conference seemed to indicate that the moratorium would be extended to March 31.
"But," FTW was told, "from what I can see, they are unlikely to want to extend it much past that."
The nearest to official word was from Safmarine's Ivan Heesom-Green, a member of the forum's executive committee, who told FTW: "There's nothing that Clof can say at this time."
Nor could he comment on the information leaked to FTW about the end-March extension of the moratorium deadline.
There was no official word from the conference, said Heesom-Green, and they were "currently looking at what's happening at the Port of Durban, and what
is happening with the meetings {with the National Ports Authority (NPA) and SA Port Operations (Sapo)} that are going on".
But, he added, the good news - for shippers - was that the surcharge is not being levied by any of the lines in this week following the original moratorium deadline.