Ongoing consultation regarding exclusion of liner shipping from EU anti-trust laws and regulations.

CLECAT – European Association for Forwarding, Transport, Logistics and Customs Services – since many years has been demanding for the European anti-trust laws to apply to oceanic shipowners.

CLECAT formally applied to EU authorities to investigate biggest shipowners’ business practices. CLECAT claims the shipowners use unfair and discriminatory practices, inflate their prices, and monopolize the market.
In July ten trade organizations, representing the owners and freight – forwarders of cargo, port terminal operators and other parts of the supply chain dependent on container shipping, demanded an immediate start to the review of European Union’s Consortia Block Exemption Regulation for the container shipping industry. The anti-trust regulation exemption favors the shipowner alliances and their control over shipping lines. The biggest shipowners allied within three main global consortia dominated 80 percent of global market and 95 percent of the biggest east-west trade routes.
Despite the decreased freight rates container shipping lines will reach record profits this year. For quite some time their activities are aimed to eliminate the freight forwarding companies from the container shipping business resulting in record level prices and drastically lower service levels.

The results of intense CLECAT & PISIL activity to influence the world shipping business can be seen already.

Directorate-General for Competition European Commission decided to speed up the consultation regarding the actual European Union’s Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER). The European Commission invited all stakeholders to submit their comments on functioning of the regulation exempting container line shipowner alliances from EU anti-trust laws and regulations.

There is a chance to improve the situation of freight forwarding companies as well as the situation of the entire deep-sea container shipping supply chain.