The container ship that blocked the Suez Canal earlier this year has departed Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake to fanfare and a signing ceremony for a compensation agreement between its owners and the Suez Canal Authority (SCA). No party involved has disclosed details of the compensation agreement, other than the inclusion of a new tugboat for the SCA. The Wall Street Journal reported that the preliminary deal totalled $200m, while Egyptian media and others said the deal could be as much as $550m. The SCA originally demanded $916m (£650m) in compensation, including a “salvage bonus”, and $300m for “loss of reputation”, a claim the UK P&I Club called “extraordinarily large” and “largely unsupported”. The Suez canal is responsible for at least10% of world shipping traffic, and is a focal point of Egyptian nationalism, earning the country roughly $5bn a year in revenues. In May the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, urged canal authorities to expand the lower half of the canal within a year, after he demanded an $8.2bn project to widen an upper section of the waterway in 2014 also be completed within a year.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN