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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.

If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.

Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.

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Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?

Even if he could manage the ship, a random crew member is highly unlikely to have resources to care for a ship like that... what value is there in assigning him this responsibility? They just punishing someone for the sake of it?

> Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?

The article doesn't state it really explicitly but I believe he was able to decline but maybe not aware of when that decision would need to be made - specifically this passage here:

> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative [of the shipping company] told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."

> Mohammed, they said, should never have signed the order in the first place.

It sounds like he signed a thing without fully understanding the ramifications of it - some eygptian official might have pulled a sneaky to trick him into signing it without full knowledge of the consequences or he may have simply acted unwisely but, either way, I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him (for instance, one of the actual owners could've stepped up and owned their error), or provided clear guidance and legal advice to the crew members.

The fact that the captain GTFO'd before any of this really started to go down really reinforces that this guy was left holding the short end of the stick and the company itself is pretty insanely slimy for not, at least, attempting to continue to support him.

Swimming to shore to get fresh water is a seriously messed up scenario.

I might be misunderstanding the situation, but it sounds like the original captain knew what was going on and sacrificed Mohammed for his own freedom. I assume the captain has original responsibility in this case. The captain left the ship and never came back. He presumably told Egyptians that his first officer is now in charge, or the Egyptians boarded the ship and determined that the First Officer was the highest ranking official on the ship.

Either way it sounds like the Captain probably knew what was going on. When the Captain learned that the parent company had ran out of money, he probably was aware of these cases of seafarer abandonment and decided he didn't want to be one of them. So he left the ship, leaving the responsibility on Mohammed.

Mohammed claimed he didn't really know the meaning of this responsibility until everyone else started disembarking. It sounds like by then the captain had been gone, for at least 4 months, and potentially longer.

The Captain sacrificed Mohammed here. Either way, someone was going to be abandoned on that vessel. I think the Captain saw the writing on the wall and abandoned quickly, shifting responsibility onto someone else.

There are lots of people at fault here. Egyptian authorities, Tyson Shipping and Marine Company (which seems to have continued operating despite all this), and the Captain. Unfortunately Mohammed is one of the innocent ones caught in the middle. He shouldn't have signed the paper as the shipping company is quick to point out. But that doesn't resolve the real issue. It would have just meant the Captain or someone else would have been forced into this situation.

>I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him

Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation. The problem is almost entirely with the Egyptian authorities. Such a situation shouldn't even be possible to develop. The first mate in the article might not have understood the ramifications of what he signed, but the Egyptian court certainly did.

There are all kinds of reasons for why a shipping company would be unable to help. That doesn't mean it should leave a person in a legal limbo. That's on the country rather than the company.

I'm surprised the guy didn't just leave. A country whose laws don't respect you doesn't deserve respect in return.

I'm really unfamiliar with maritime laws but I wouldn't be surprised if seizing unmanned boats that are flying the flags of a different country but within your waters is somehow a touchy international grey-zone.

This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).

Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).

I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.

If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.

I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.

>Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation

Removing a ship could cause an international incident, but forcing a person to stay alone on a ship without proper living conditions for years wouldn't? Imagine if the guy wasn't Syrian, but was an American instead. This would've either been resolved quickly or there would've been an international incident that would've put the removal of a ship to shame.

>Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation.

The CEO was the right person to to replace him immediately until they could make it a sufficiently attractive proposition that someone else would want to do it. You know by the usual means. Pay, supply drops, fuel for power etc.

The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form. It's so bad I would have no issue with the company being blacklisted as a criminal organisation.

>The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form.

And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared? Then what? There could be any number of reasons why a company might be unable to do what they need to do. The guy is still stuck there then, because it all rests on the shipping company rather than the country whose government is holding him there.

Running and hiding when insolvency hits is illegal in most places. But sure, it's certainly possible that this has happened to his employer while that company who employ him is still providing quotes about it being impossible to find anyone who would take his place but not paying him either.

So in insolvency that is deemed bankruptcy the assets of the company are traditionally used to deal with as much of the liabilities of the company as they can in rank order of those liabilities. You know secured debt ranks ahead of unsecured etc.

This guy's claim on the assets of the company to get him out of that hell, for me, rank number 1, and alone. Next comes the wages due all employees not deprived of their liberty. And that's the usual way it is done too.

I'm not talking about this specific instance. I'm saying that companies can fail to do something due to myriad reasons. You shouldn't tie a third party's freedom (the ship's "legal guardian") to a company behaving correctly. If the company doesn't deal with the jeopardy a person is in then governments should try to resolve it in a reasonable timeframe or at least create reasonable accommodations until the situation is resolved.

Nup. Not even close. Choosing to dump your employee in hell is /wrong/. There is no excuse in this instance or any. There's a different choice you can make so make it. The end. The local laws that are a necessary condition for your employee being retained in hell are simply not interesting if you have the choice to get them out of hell. It is clear that this is a choice. But sure, the company could also agitate for legal reform in Egypt once they secured the liberty of their employee. That's a responsible thing to do.

Then if a company has behaved abysmally by choosing to dump their employee in hell then the law needs to be involved on those making that decision. Absolutely. There needs to be consequences for making that /choice/. As was clearly made in this instance assuming the accuracy of the report.

Then whoever was second in command at the company sells off the ship (probably at a loss) and uses some of the money to send the first officer home. If they can't afford to keep the ship then they shouldn't sit on the title and trap one of their own employees in a derelict floating prison.

>And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared?

If the company did well instead of go bankrupt who is cashing the biggest check? That is who is responsible. Work your way down that list until you find someone, everyone you can't find is a fugitive and has their assets seized.

The shipping company is clearly lying. Plenty of people would take a job living on a boat for a while.

Yea, additionally, the guy was staying on the boat unpaid for the duration - so it's a lot easier to read their actions as pure greed.

There's also a good chance they could've declared the ship lost at sea and either scuttled it or offered it for a dollar (or other token currency amount) to salvage companies.

I think his job was basically security guard for the property. Also, if the ship were to come unmoored and collide with another vessel they would need someone to blame.

But why can't he quit? If the owning company didn't assign another guard that's their fault, not the guard. Imagine if a chauffeur was forever assigned to a car because it broke on a disabled parking place. It would just get towed and the bill or court order sent to the actual owner and the chauffeur can quit.

100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.

Mentally imagining the situation you described with a chauffeur is hilarious - which only underlines the absurdity of this poor guy's situation.

Preventing unmooring probably requires to repaint/reoil the moor every few months to prevent rust. I wonder whether 1 person is enough to take care of the remaining maintenance of a wreck: electrical boards, meals, rats... Crews are also constantly repainting the hull while at sea, this is why it still takes 20 crew on top of a captain to man a ship.

I'm sure he had no supplies for basic maintenence, but the law still requires someone to hold accountable so it would be him.

It would be interesting if this did happen and the court found him guilty of dereliction of duty for not conjuring replacement parts out of thin air. Would he be sent to a land prison or back to the prison of the ship?

I suspect it is like assigning child support to fathers even if they were raped or it is not their kid.

Somebody needs to do it and the crew members are the simplest people to task it to.

Do what exactly? Keep the ship company so it won't feel lonely? It doesn't seem like there was anything for him to do during those years.

'assigning ... to fathers even if.. it is not their kid."

Say what?

If the poster meant “people legally designated as fathers” and was referring to, e.g., the presumption (conclusive in some jurisdictions) of paternity based on marriage at time of birth, its not completely senseless.

Do what?

The ship had no fuel, it went adrift and ran aground...

Yeah that is the part I do not understand.

Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters?

If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that no one would want to buy it? If that is the case it seems odd that he couldn't himself abandon the ship to the lien holders.

International salvage law is complex, but essentially no. The ship is stills owned.by someone even when at the bottom of the sea and if you take anything from the ship without permission that is theft.

Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.

If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.

He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.

The company also owes him a salary, he is in possession of company property, selling said property to recuperate lost salary seems reasonable.

I'm no lawyer (so don't try this at home), and I bet you'd need to find a good lawyer to get a with a trick like that :)

But as a creditor in possession of property owned by the debitor, selling said property to recuperate losses doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.

Certainly, not if debitor does not take action recover possession of the property, etc.

Even if he got into trouble after selling the ship, I would hope a jury would side the person being held for "ransom by said property".

But yes, between Egyptian and Syrian courts, I suppose there is a serious risk you'll get squashed either way. Because we can't have sailors selling their ships :)

Very off topic, but does this mean that wrecks from warships lost during, say, WWII are still owned by their respective navies?

Depends. If the Navy lost then the winner might own them. Reciently the remains of WWI ships that Germany scuttled so they couldn't be captured, went on eBay (the ships were intured in an English harbor at the time). They are considered a public attraction, so the owner won't be allowed to do anything other than grant permission to visiting divers.

It's not abandoned. The government assigned this guy as the caretaker of the property.

That’s slavery

They may have been paying him.

(it would still be slavery, however, you have a right to quit your job).

He was unpaid and the Egyptian courts won't let him leave.

Find a 500 year d ship full of gold and everyone owns it. Even the original insurance company.

If you dig into the class of people who own ships, you’ll realize that the government doesn’t want to offend the wealthy class.

A lot of shipping issues are complicated because we have no global government and we have a lot of international waters and shipping, by its very nature, tends to involve ships passing from one legal jurisdiction to another repeatedly.

It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?"

There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again.

Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long.

And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.

The problem was that this man >>signed<< a document where he agreed to be "legally bound to this ship"... So be careful before you are signing something...

You are putting way to much stock in "signing a document". Anybody can document an injustice, and make it feel "justified" - but that doesn't make it justified. If I were to convince someone to sign a document saying they have to work for me for free, I'm still a slaveholder. Pick which one - morality or legality - there is no way that document should have been held as valid for longer than a few months, nor was there any way that document was morally ok

Alternatively - if you're not in the Eygptian legal system - be careful of trying to make someone sign something they don't comprehend - in the US at best the contract will be invalidated and at worst you might be held responsible for any damages if it was your job to clearly communicate the rights the parties had w.r.t. the contract before signing.

That all said - that's a hard battle and one you're probably not going to win unless you a) don't be speak english or b) don't have full control of your mental faculties - "I couldn't be arsed to read the contract" is generally not a defense unless the contract goes out of its way to be intentionally misleading.

We don't know what the situation was here. It could even be that all the sailors were required to sign some standard-looking documentation (no idea what, agreement to terminate their contract with x% of salary, papers allowing them to enter Egypt) before leaving the ship, but he was given something that was different and bound him to the ship as its guardian. Your advice still stands of course.

> It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.

This doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves the problem around to the free market. What if no one wanted to buy it for scrap? Would he be responsible for cleaning up the situation himself? The court should have impounded the ship using Egypt's own coast guard and billed the company for the coast guard's time.

> The article says there are thousands of these cases

It said 250, not thousands.

You're assuming that it's valuable to a scrapping company. Sometimes a grounded ship is more trouble than it's worth.

The ship looked quite large. I would imagine scrappers in Turkey or Pakistan would have paid well, considering the price of steel. But you'd need investors to pay for transport and any Egyptian fees. And to secure investors you'd need to resolve property rights, at least tentatively, to the point the ship could be released, likely requiring some experienced maritime lawyer able to work quickly to avoid getting bogged down in litigation.

I bet there would be significant profit in it, at least from the perspective of a handful of individuals, and especially if things could be arranged to make the sailor judgment proof--e.g. have his share of any proceeds go to family members--so free loaders (i.e. lazy ship owners, clients, and insurers) couldn't swoop in at the end to claim any proceeds. But it's not just a matter of profit; it's a matter of opportunity costs. All the parties most capable of pulling this off clearly felt there was more profit to be had by walking away and pursuing other opportunities.

Surely people on HN understand this phenomenon: there are an infinite number of profitable opportunities out there, but some are better than others, and there's only a finite amount of time and capital.

Suppose he did sell the ship, without proper authority, wouldn’t that be a civil matter between he and the owners? It was basically derelict, right? It seems like a salvage company could come in, pay any fines to Egypt, fuel the ship a d then drive it away and it would be theirs. That further incentives the owners to handle their business.

It would probably be difficult to find a salvage company willing to take on that much legal risk.

Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?

I don't know how collateral on a mortgage on a ship this size works. But I am pretty sure even if they handed it to him, he couldn't do anything with it because it would have a Lein on it.

Your point still remains valid though.

> he couldn't do anything with it because it would have a Lein on it.

If he had title, then he could sell it. The lienholder, however, would have a claim on the proceeds of the sale.

Lein’s don’t normally work that way after a boat was seized. Handing it to the remaining sailor isn’t identical, but don’t assume loans have much weight here.

The mess of US civil forfeiture laws originally showed up in maritime law such that the owners and outstanding loans became irrelevant. In effect the physical object is what’s confiscated breaking any ties to anyone that had a prior ownership stake.

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