The Charterers P&I Club

“Charterers Liability Insurance – Essential Best Practice is a practical guide written specifically for timecharterers, voyage charterers and cargo traders to acquaint them with the marine insurance market and how their liabilities might be properly protected.” So said Michael Grey MBE, celebrated commentator on maritime affairs, following the publication of the only book to be written on charterers’ insurance living memory.

With the support of the Charterers P&I Club, Heinz Gohlish undertook to produce a comprehensive work which would bring together the many facets of chartering and liability insurance and at the same time provide basic details of how the marine insurance market works for charters. The authors who has spent 18 years of his varied career underwriting charterers’’ liability risks, said: “Many charterers possess a basic awareness of their liability exposure, but lack experience in this field and often have little background of the arcane practices of marine insurance. This book should prove invaluable to them. It should also be a useful reference and guide for students of maritime commerce and insurance.”

The principal aim of Charterers Liability Insurance is to assist charterers in their management and mitigation of charterers’ liability risks. The ways means of how this can best be effected is particularly important during this period of uncertain trading conditions, both in chartering ships and in transporting commodities worldwide.

While the book has been deliberately written in plain English, inevitably legal aspects concerning contracts and claims handling procedures form a large part of the text. Much of that is contained within the five Appendices. Advice in legal topics has been sought from recognised experts in their field and assistance in this respect was obtained from Julian Clark of Holman Fenwick Willan International aw well as the in-house claims team in The Charterers Club. Julian is one of the foremost maritime solicitors in London today and his summary and comments on a number of landmark legal decisions which affect charterers, as set out in the book, will be an invaluable reference.

While the book is primarily aimed at chartering practitioners, it will also be a useful for commodity traders, shipping students and maritime lawyers.