New agency appointment agreement

FONASBA and BIMCO have recently published a new agreement for use by ship agents. The agreement is intended to cover one-off port calls and sets out the parties’ obligations in a short and simple way. ITIC’s claims director, Andrew Jamieson, was a member of the committee that produced the document. At a
webinar publicising the new agreement, Andrew commented that while many
agency appointments were casual and concluded either verbally or more usually by a brief exchange of emails ITIC had seen owners imposing written terms.

The difficulty with these documents is that they often were adapted from general service provider agreements and so did not deal with the specific issues of a port call. Alternatively, they were unreasonably
onerous for the ship agent. The new agreement, which is the first to specifically address one-off port calls, was drafted with input from both ship agents and owners. It therefore provides a balanced approach to this type of business.

The agreement wording can be downloaded from ITIC’s website.