Our podcast guest this week is a return guest, Emanuele Grimaldi, one of the co-owners of Italy’s Grimaldi Group, which operates a significant fleet of car carriers and roro ferries. As he put it in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal – “We are waiting for the World to restart” – a sentiment no doubt shared by many of his peers.
In this week’s interview we talk about his expectations for a recovery, but we also explore why he has felt it necessary to launch antitrust complaints against the governments he feels are distorting the marketplace by bailing out weak shipping lines at the expense of those operating in the same trades that are well capitalised.
We also touch on the subject of roro safety in the wake of yet another care deck fire, this time aboard Grimaldi’s ro-Pax vessel Cruise Bonaria. Although the incident was not a serious one, a recent spate of fires has raised safety concerns and reignited Mr Grimaldi’s long standing concerns regarding safety rules, cargo misdeclaration and electrical issues that responsible for the vast majority of fires board these types of vessels.
