Recently, Baird Maritime columnist Hieronymus Bosch reached out to Norway's HAV Shipping to get the company's take on some of its vessels being involved in a number of drone incidents in Europe, as covered in Hieronymus' Offshore Accounts column earlier this week. The following is the response from HAV Shipping Chair Petter Kleppan.
Dear Hieronymus Bosch,
Thank you for the below: I will start with an overview:
First of all; I started the HAV Shipping group in 1999 (100 per cent ownership through my private, small invest company, Primus Invest) based on money I had earned selling the company Business Communication Systems (Oslo) to the technology company TeleS (Berlin) in 1998/1999.
HAV Shipping is the parent in the HAV Shipping Group. There is no independent activity here: only the 100 per cent ownership of three daughter companies:
• HAV Bulk (Oslo) is the shipowning company. Per today HB owns 16 ships (among these HAV Dolphin and HAV Snapper). In addition, HB owns 49 per cent of HAV Kattegat that again owns one ship (HAV Pike). HB has no employees; all required work is handled by the two operational companies.
• HAV Chartering (Oslo) takes care of the operation and chartering (sales) of all vessels owned by HB (previously we have also had external customers but not at the moment). HC charges HB a percentage of the freight income that HC is able to generate.
• HAV Ship Management (Oslo) takes care of the technical management and crewing for its customers. In addition to HB, HSM also has an external European shipowner as a crewing customer. HSM charges its customers a fixed fee per ship per year for technical management and a small fee per provided crew member per month. HSM has a representative office in Kaliningrad/Russia in order to gather crew.
All information about these companies is official and can be found in Norwegian Government archives: www.brreg.no.
As you understand, HAV Shipping is a fully integrated shipping company. As a professional shipping company, we follow all laws, rules and sanctions (regularly checked by our lawyers). Thus, HAV only has large and well-established European companies as customers. We carry dry bulk goods from port to port for each customer (steel, curb-stones, grain, scrap, etc). We have no Russian customers and none of our income comes from Russia (HAV has "self-sanctioned" and does not ship to no/from Russian customers, nor do we work through any Russian brokers).
I will also shortly mention that the European shortsea trade is a very important part of European industry with around 3,000 ships; without this, the "wheels of Europe" will stop.
Russian crew are used by very many European shipping companies, as they are used to the Northern European Climate and are quality oriented. Without these Russian crew, there will be logistic challenges in Europe.
To your questions:
1. As mentioned above, Russian crew form a very important part of the European shortsea fleet. They are well educated, and they are used to the cold European Weather. Payments to Russia have become more difficult, but there are European solutions that enables us, as well as most other European shipowners, to legally pay crew in a satisfactory way.
We do have some systems in relation to our crew regarding drones, etc, and we do not want to disclose these, but we are investigating if we should do more. If one should have a "broken egg" among its crew, we think it would be very difficult for him to do some illegal activity alone, and we find it unlikely that the whole crew is "infected".
Please also notice that HAV sails only "spot". This means that the crew have no idea where the next trip will be headed to before the voyage starts. We have some ships on TC to other big European operators, but they also are mainly doing spot trade.
2. I do not think that there is any credible circumstantial evidence to connect our ships to drone activities. The other articles that I have seen are in my personal opinion not professional research, but [done by] journalists who are biased and very eagerly want to find "something" without having any tangible info. Just guessing and conspiring. Some examples:
In one article they criticise our anchoring positions, but these positions are given to us by the authorities in different countries. And in difficult times, there are more waiting (at anchorage) for cargo than in other times. Some journalists have big blown-up pictures (covering only a few hundred metres) of "suspicious movements", but these are normal patterns when one is at anchor.
We have been criticised for having more crew than required. Normally the so-called "safe manning" is six or seven crew on our vessels, but we usually add one extra crew in order to adhere to watch-duty time rules (and also in order to do maintenance on board). If not, we will get the ITF on our back.
The shortsea trade in the Baltic is very hard for the crew with short voyages and a lot of work in between. And again, there are many hundred shortsea ships (if not thousands) with Russian crew. In addition comes the rest of the shipping fleet where also Russian crews are in abundance.
We have also seen the term "shadow fleet" used in reference to our ships; Normally when one talks about the "shadow fleet," one think of oil tankers with unknown owners and shady or false flag-states trying to evade sanctions (often with AIS turned off).
In the case of HAV there is a known Norwegian owner running its ships under well accepted flag states: Bahamas (London), and Antigua and Barbuda (Oldenburg), and with AIS turned on. Our ships are, as all other ships, inspected in almost every harbour by customs, PSC, police, ITF, etc.
3. HAV ship Management has a representative office in Kaliningrad that finds crew for us. With this as a background, we started to do docking work at Pregol Yard in Kaliningrad because they allowed us to use our "own" crew for some of the "non-qualified" work, like de-mudding, grinding rust, simple painting, thus saving money.
On this background we have left spares like propellers in Kaliningrad. When we have been going to this yard for docking, we have bought all required new parts (and more) in advance in Europe and brought it on the ship to the yard. We have regularly been checking Pregol Yard and the owners for sanctions through the authorities (by our lawyers) and none have so far been sanctioned.
As a curiosity I could also mention that the two owners of the Pregol Yard/Kaliningrad are from Kyiv and all their relatives still live there. We have now stopped going to Pregol Yard because it is getting too complicated with customs, acceptance, etc.
4. I have answered this question above, and my domicile is in the centre of Oslo [The question: Your website states that the company is Norwegian owned, but who are the ultimate beneficial owners of the holding company which controls HAV Shipping and HAV Chartering?]
5. I do not know anything about drone-investigations on HAV Snapper and HAV Dolphin, other than the guesswork from journalists. However, we charter most of the ships ourselves (HAV Chartering), but we have a few ships on TC to big European operators.
We cannot give away names of our customers but again, they are all well known bona fide commercial entities. You are more than welcome to visit HAV Chartering in Oslo to go through all our voyage records, including customer names, agents, other brokers, etc. You would probably recognise all customers directly.
6. HAV Chartering is doing checks of all our customers, and they are all bona fide big commercial entities, some British, focusing mostly on steel and grain (many of them are also stock listed). I do not know who or what this Jan Marsalek that you mention is, but I will check with HAV Chartering and come back to you [The question: What KYC have you put in place to ensure that the charterers are bona fide commercial entities and not individuals like Jan Marsalek or his associates?].
We do not know anything about "trainee officers" and/or crew behaving suspiciously. In between, we have "trainees" as the seventh crew on board, and they might have been "scared" by some situation or just being nervous for an unknown situation, and thus they might perhaps have appeared different than one would expect?
Normally our crew is very well behaved and friendly.
I hope the above is something you can start with while we are collecting more details. Also feel free to reach out with more questions.
Merry Christmas to you too.
Sincerely,
Petter Kleppan
Chairman, HAV Shipping
Oslo
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