By Gus Trompiz, Christoph Steitz and Dave Sherwood<\/p>\n
PARIS\/FRANKFURT\/HAVANA, May 17 (Reuters) – Shipping giants CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have suspended all bookings \u200cto and from Cuba until further notice, they said separately \u200con Sunday, with both citing a U.S. executive order issued on May 1.<\/p>\n
\u201cFollowing the U.S. \u200bExecutive Order issued on May 1, CMA CGM has decided to suspend its bookings to or from Cuba until further notice,\u201d the French shipping giant said in an emailed statement. It added it was \u201cclosely monitoring the situation\u201d \u200cand would adapt its operations \u2060in compliance with applicable regulations.<\/p>\n
A Hapag-Lloyd spokesman said the German company was similarly suspending Cuban orders “due to compliance risks \u2060associated with the U.S. president\u2019s executive order of May 1.”<\/p>\n
The Cuban government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The temporary suspension of new \u200borders by \u200btwo of the world\u2019s largest shipping \u200bcompanies could jeopardize as much \u200cas 60% of Cuba’s shipping traffic by volume, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation said \u2014 a major blow to a country already nearing collapse amid a U.S. oil blockade that has throttled the island of fuel.<\/p>\n
Shipping of goods from China would be most impacted by the \u200corder, the sources said. Northern Europe and \u200bthe Mediterranean would also be severely impacted, \u200bthe sources added, though all \u200bglobal shipping to Cuba would be affected.<\/p>\n
The Trump executive \u200corder on May 1 broadened existing \u200bU.S. sanctions on \u200bcommerce with Cuba to include “any foreign person” operating in the “energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector \u200bof the Cuban economy, \u200cor any other sector of the Cuban economy.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gus Trompiz, \u200bChristoph Steitz and Dave Sherwood; Writing by Mathieu Rosemain; Editing \u200bby Barbara Lewis and Chris Reese)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gus Trompiz, Christoph Steitz and Dave Sherwood PARIS\/FRANKFURT\/HAVANA, May 17 (Reuters) – Shipping giants CMA CGM and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2213,370,12022,5,12021],"class_list":["post-15811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-cma-cgm","tag-cuba","tag-executive-order","tag-france","tag-hapag-lloyd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}