By Tom Westcott.
Tripoli, 17 August 2013:
A Ukrainian vessel held over a dispute about a shipment of cars allegedly commandeered earlier in . . .[restrict]the year by a sister ship, has now spent four weeks in Benghazi Port.
The local businessmen who seized the vessel insist that MV Etel will not be released until 597 “stolen” cars have been returned from the Ukraine.
“We are keeping the ship until we get our cars,” Abd Al-Rauf Al-Tajoury, one of a group of 25 Benghazi businessmen who bought the cars from Jordan, told the Libya Herald. He said that the group had this week sent a Turkish ship to the Ukraine to collect the cars.
The vehicles, worth some $16 million, were due to be shipped from Jordan to Benghazi in March on MV Faina, a vessel operated by Ukrainian firm Tomex Team. However, after coming up through the Suez canal, the Faina changed direction and took the cars to the Ukraine, where they were impounded upon arrival.
The Benghazi investors spent four months unsuccessfully trying to get the cars back through official means, including starting legal proceedings against the operator. When they heard that another vessel, Etel – also operated by Tomex Team – was coming to Benghazi, they took matters into their own hands.
On 18 July, after the vessel’s cargo had been unloaded, the investors seized the ship. Although initially held “unofficially,” a court order was secured from Benghazi’s north courthouse, just before it was bombed, to hold the vessel officially.
After a number of high-level meetings, including one between senior ministerial and diplomatic personnel, an agreement was apparently reached.
“A deal has been made to swap the cars in the Ukraine for the boat,” Benghazi Port Manager Mustafa Al-Abar told the Libya Herald, “and releasing the boat is dependent on the cars being sent.”
The Ukrainian government, which held the shipment since March pending investigation, has released the vehicles. “The cars were released as soon as the government had worked out who owned them,” a diplomatic source told the Libya Herald: “The matter is now in private hands, and is between the car owners and the shipping company.”
Al-Tajoury said the cars could be brought back to Benghazi in a matter of days.
However, the captain, sick of being confined to the 124 metre-long vessel for a month, does not seem so convinced. “Nobody knows what’s going on, and nobody has clarified anything, but it’s not true that the boat is coming from the Ukraine,” the Captain of the Etel – who declined to give his name – told the Libya Herald. “Now we are prisoners,” he said, “we have to stay on board the ship and there is not enough space.”
There is suspicion in Benghazi that the cars were being held by the Ukraine as a bargaining tool for 24 prisoners imprisoned in Libya after being found guilty of working as Qaddafi mercenaries during the revolution.
“It’s a political thing,” Al-Tajoury insisted, “before we seized this ship, the Ukrainians told us if Libya released the Ukrainian prisoners, they would give the cars back. But they didn’t know we would do something like this.”
The Faina, unable to leave the Ukraine while under investigation, set sail for the first time in five months on 14 August, according to vessel-tracking websites. This was the same day that 19 of the Ukrainians had their sentences cancelled and their cases turned over to the civil courts.
This is not the first time the Faina has courted controversy. In 2008 the vessel, carrying 33 Soviet-made T-72 tanks and heavy weaponry apparently destined for South Sudan, was stormed by Somali pirates. It was held for five months before a ransom of $3.2 million secured its release. [/restrict]
