Cutting edge

Stacks of numbers, piles of paper and hours of painstaking calculations by the industry’s brightest brains conspire to providing shipping firms with up to the minute market analysis, right?

Is accurate research an each way bet?

Wrong, by a country mile, according to expert testimony offered up to a London court as the $800m Sovcomflot trial continued today.

Producing market data is more of a classic Friday afternoon syndrome, according to ex-broker Simon Day.

Pressed by Steven Berry QC, who is representing Russian shipowner Yuri Nikitin in the trial of the century, on how shipbrokers' research teams produce their weekly reports, Day did not hold back.

He said: “Having worked in big broking houses the youngest lad from the research department goes around the senior brokers on a Friday and gets rather disconsolate answers.”

Depending on how this affects his concentration this can lead to “inaccurate figures” being left in week after week, especially if “he doesn’t ask the right broker”, Day told the court.

His tongue was equally sharp when quizzed on the merits of Halla’s Incheon yard, which was contracted to build eight Arbat Class vessels for Sovcomflot in the early 1990s.

Having previously dismissed it as a “second rate" facility, Day said: “If I was being cruel I’d say it had built 169 fishing boats, three small tankers and then the Arbat vessels.”

(Click here to read earlier exclusive reports from the Sovcomflot corruption trial as well as the interlocutory judgments in full.)

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