Hughes minding the store?

Monday 8 February 2010

AMERICAN Club chairman and chief executive Joe Hughes, pictured, is one of those rare class acts in the industry who is as elegant in sentence construction as he is in appearance.

At a lively recent debate on P&I issues at the Piraeus Marine Club, Hughes delivered a typically entertaining and well-argued plea for the P&I industry to avoid excessive concentration, conjuring up a dystopia ruled by a handful of bloated mega-clubs. By contrast, he said, the current structure of 13 clubs within the International Group offered shipowners the best of all combinations.

What better way to underline the charms of the protection and indemnity status quo than to compare it with the modern up-market department store?

“You have the benefit of having the individual retailers and the designer boutiques and the convenience of having the choices within one large store,” he said. “And that is how the IG works.”

Today’s P&I Club was like “a boutique in a department store”.

Warming to the analogy, and perhaps to ram home the debating point to an audience of shopping-challenged residents of Athens, Hughes reeled off a few of the retail outlets he favours. Saks Fifth Avenue and its luxury Fifth Avenue competition, Bergdorf Goodman, seemed to get endorsements as examples of the real thing. But he hastened to reassure the audience he had visited the latter establishment “only once in my life”.

Bemused Marine Clubbers were left to ponder whether this was a wistful reflection of belt-tightening at the American Club. Or was it simply the wily insurer in Hughes emerging to insert some fine print, conscious of the risk of being accused of excessive clothes-buying? Claim denied!

Roger says negative

SECONDING the motion that fewer and bigger will always be badder, at least when we are talking about P&I Clubs, was analyst Roger Ingles of UK-based Elysian Insurance Services.

Ingles savaged the idea of consolidation from multiple points of view, saying it would harm service, diminish industry participation in the club system, would throttle prospects for staff and stifle talent in the sector, and would not yield any saving anyway.

Was there no benefit whatsoever that Ingles could see in consolidation? Mulling the idea that constriction in the number of clubs could make club chief executives an endangered species prompted him to muse that “maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all”.

But a quick look around the room and the thought that a P&I sector cull would necessarily lay waste also to current requirements for brokers — and, er, analysts — convinced him he had been on the right track all along.

Greek art of giving

EVANGELOS Marinakis is buying tankers but he is giving away art and that is not because he is a philistine.

On February 10, 43 works of art from Marinakis’ collection will provide the backbone of an art auction in Athens in aid of children’s charities. The pieces being donated by the shipowner include works by well-known modern Greek artists such as Spyros Vassiliou, Kostas Tsoklis and Yannis Tsarouchis, as well as work by non-Greek artists.

Altogether, 85 works are on offer in the auction and will be offered at starting prices ranging from €70 to €20,000 ($97 to $27,700). All proceeds will go to Together for the Child, an umbrella organisation of 10 Greek children’s charities and agencies.

The move is not a first for a shipping personality: Stelios Haji-Ioannou sold his private art collection for the same charity a few years back. However, it is a highly commendable one. A shipping newspaper is not supposed to know much about art but we know what we like.

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