The old swashbuckling days of the playboy ship owner, of the fellow with no cares in the world who does multimillion dollar deals over coffee, are gone.
Helmut Sohmen
We ship owners and our predecessors, all the way back to the dawn of history, operating in majority on private initiative and at our own risk, have been linking the world together much more effectively than governments ever managed to do or will likely ever be capable of doing.
We believe it is important to have an organisational link in London, still the world's premier maritime centre.
London is the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation, the location of the largest insurance market, and houses a significant ship-broking community, apart from the many other professional services related to shipping.
In Asia, democracy has been less advanced than elsewhere. And many of these countries haven't done too badly.
Ships are like children: they need individual attention.
Everybody has to build double-hull tankers, but charterers don't want to pay for the extra costs.
Given the international nature of the tanker industry, it is important that global regimes are applied consistently and universally, not local or regional rules that do not recognise the total commercial and operating backdrop.
We cannot, of course, eliminate all accidents - no industry can do that.
Kagoshima is the first step in our plan to develop increased scheduled air links between Hong Kong and Japan, especially the southern islands of Kyushu and Okinawa.
If the two largest economies in the world don't show us a good example on trade liberalization, then you can't expect the smaller and weaker economies to take the risks. The initiative, the momentum and the drive really do have to come from Japan and the U.S.
