ESC dismisses ELAA survey as unlawful

ESC dismisses ELAA survey as unlawful    The European Shippers' Council has rejected a survey of shippers conducted by the European Liner Affairs Association saying, “the results would be thrown out of court.”
   On Monday, the ELAA reported high-percentage approval for its revised proposal to the liner conference system from a survey that pooled responses from 21 'major shippers.'
   The ESC expressed anger with the ELAA when it first found out about the survey in the summer, believing that it was being side-stepped in the discussion process by ELLA directly contacting shippers.
   'We believe the survey questions to be leading,' said Nicolette van der Jagt, secretary general of the ESC. 'The survey only covered a very small number of shippers, and the majority of the shippers-freight forwarders were interviewed before the publication of the revised proposals on which the (European) Commission has sought responses from.
   'The results would be thrown out of court and deemed to be inadmissible if anyone cared to properly assess them, the way the survey was conducted, and not least by the fact it was conducted by those that had a vested interest in the survey producing answers that supported their own proposals!
   'We would advise people not to read too much into the survey; to ask themselves the question: Should you accept responses from a handful of individuals that have not been given all the facts, or would they be better listening to the views of those who had spent days considering and pondering over the revised proposals of the ELAA, solely in order to ensure that the interests of shippers were protected and to properly answer the questions from the commission?' van der Jagt said. 'Also, who would you trust: those who have a vested interest in the proposals being accepted, or those who have not?'
   van der Jagt said the ESC last week received examples from the Far Eastern Freight Conference that the ELAA's proposed Far East/Europe trade committee would actually create an even stronger carrier cartel system.
   'By using information on trade volumes, capacity utilization, price indexes and forecasts, they could give very clear signals to carriers operating in the trade as to when to introduce a peak season surcharge — an absolutely preposterous invention of the liner shipping conferences anyway to generate additional revenue,” van der Jagt said.
   'Yet this is the proposal of ELAA, to allow the lines to have such information on all trades, shared with all carriers, discussed and interpreted by the whole liner shipping industry. The new FEFC would result in something far worse than last week's peak season announcements because they would have the capability to enforce it on everyone.
   'This is a clear example of the capability lines, armed with the right type of data, that taken individually might seem to many to be perfectly harmless, but together will enable them to manipulate rates via capacity management.
   'Given the record they have — even today as demonstrated by the FEFC, we have to assume that this remains their intention, until time allows us to judge that they have changed. Given this interpretation of the ELAA proposals, (we) now ask those that ELAA surveyed whether they still think it would be safe to accept the ELAA proposals.'
   A copy of the ELAA’s revised proposal is available at https://www.elaa.net/documents/RevisedELAAProposal.pdf.