Denmark's DFDS group and Louis Dreyfus Armateurs (LDA) of France have launched a joint bid for part of the assets and personnel of loss-making French Dover Strait ferry operator SeaFrance. However, the bid has already been labelled unacceptable by the majority CFDT union at SeaFrance, which has promised to make a counter-bid of its own via an employee co-operative.
DFDS, which last year took over the Maersk group's Norfolkline service between the Dunkirk and Dover, is planning to take a majority position in a joint venture with LDA, which will bring together SeaFrance, its Dunkirk-Dover service and the ferry activities of LDA subsidiary LD Lines. DFDS and LDA have declined to give details of their bid, saying that it was subject to certain conditions including competition authority approval, and that it would be for the judicial administrators supervising SeaFrance's affairs to decide on a response.
The offer opens up new hope for SeaFrance, the future of which is due to be decided in late October by the Paris court of commerce, which has been overseeing the company's affairs since June 2010.
The CFDT seafarers' union has already warned, however, that it is "totally opposed" to the DFDS/LDA offer. It claims that DFDS and LDA are behind the SeaFrance management's latest plan to withdraw one of the company's four remaining ships from service and to make up to 200 additional redundancies in a workforce that has already been reduced in recent months from nearly 1,600 to less than 900.
The union, which argues that personnel are already inadequate to maintain service aboard the company's vessels, says that it is preparing its own bid for the company. Didier Cappelle, secretary of the CFDT's northern French seafarers' section, said that the union's lawyer had begun studying the company's accounts with a view to tabling a bid. He indicated that it had intended to present its bid in the late summer but said that it could present a preliminary version shortly.
Details of the DFDS/LDA plan had been expected to be presented to an extraordinary SeaFrance works committee meeting on Wednesday of last week in Paris. However, the meeting was aborted after ten minutes after the union complained that the meeting's agenda had been drawn up unilaterally by the company, in contradiction with French labour law.
The union is seeking to prevent SeaFrance management from completing the statutory consultation procedure regarding its plans for fresh cost-saving measures to satisfy the European Commission (EC)'s reservations about its existing recovery plan. The company needs to present the new measures to Seafrance's works committee at three consecutive meetings before it can implement them. It wants to be sure that it can do this and obtain EC approval for the recovery plan before its appearance before the court of commerce on October 28.
DFDS, which operates 50 passenger and freight vessels on 25 routes, said that its bid for SeaFrance was part of its strategy of building an integrated European shipping and logistics network. LDA, which runs lines between Newhaven and Dieppe and Portsmouth and Le Havre, said that consolidation was needed given the current state of crisis in which the English Channel ferry sector found itself.
Andrew Spurrier
