BIMCO PRODUCES NEW ORE, GRAIN CHARTER PARTIES

BIMCO PRODUCES NEW ORE, GRAIN CHARTER PARTIES    The documentary committee of The Baltic and International Maritime Council, a private association of shipping companies representing 65 percent of the world’s merchant fleet, has produced two new charter parties, which will be released prior to BIMCO’s general meeting, May 19-21 in Barcelona, Spain.
   The first new charter party is the COAL-OREVOY Charter, an adaptation and revision of BIMCO’s OREVOY Charter, which now encompasses the carriage of coking and steaming coal as well as iron ore.
   The second form is a new standard grain charter party, GRAINCON. “Unusually, BIMCO has designed GRAINCON without a traditional box layout, which has for many years been something of a trademark for BIMCO forms,” BIMCO said in a statement.
   Instead, the GRAINCON form “is laid out in a traditional text layout, much like the NORGRAIN form … grain traders had indicated quite strongly that maintaining the layout that most users were familiar with would play an important role in getting the document accepted,” BIMCO said.
   BIMCO has also made a series of member-recommended changes to REPAIRCON, a Standard Ship Repair Contract that has been gestating for three years and will be published this summer.
   Revisions also continue on two specialized standard charter parties, the GASVOY Voyage Charter party for Liquid Gas (except LNG), and the BIMCHEMTIME Uniform Time Charter for Vessels Carrying Chemicals in Bulk, “which have not enjoyed the degree of use that BIMCO would have liked,” the statement said.