Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
DEFINITION AND CLASSIFICATION OF MARITIME FRAUD
Peter Kapoor,†
B.Sc. (Hons.), M.C.I.T., M.N.I., M.R.I.N.A., Master Mariner.
“Uti ne propter te fidemve tuam captus fraudatusve sim”.
“Ut inter bonos bene agier oportet et sine fraudatione”.
Cicero (103–43 B.C.)
“That I be not deceived and defrauded through you and my confidence in you”.
“As between honest people there ought to be honest dealings, and no deception”.
[Cicero (45–44 B.C.): Book III, Chapter XVII, §70]
1. Introduction
In recent years the shipping industry has had to contend with the combined pressures of market penetration, increased Government intervention, flag discrimination, open registry, inflation, high labour costs, severe over-supply of tonnage and the increasing incidence of Maritime Fraud.
Today’s maritime frauds have been described as “near perfect crimes”. However, Conway (1981) writes:
“There may never be a perfect crime, but there is an ideal crime. It is a minimum risk, maximum profit affair, easily adaptable to prevailing conditions, relatively simple to operate, difficult to detect and, even if detected, still more difficult to prosecute successfully in court. The ideal crime, in short, is fraud”.
In the shipping world fraud has always been known to exist, it is only during the last decade that it has reached such proportions as to cause serious concern at both national and international levels. Several international conferences and seminars have been held and at one of them Ellen (1979a) has described the situation in the following words:
“If I describe an avalanche from its first distant rumblings, echoing around the mountains, and the slow deceptive movement of the snow field that soon accelerates into a maelstrom of noise and activity, it seems I am describing, metaphorically, what has been happening in this area of marine fraud during the past twelve months”.
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