FRANKFURT, July 14 (Reuters) – Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s fifth-largest container shipping company, on Tuesday criticised U.S. plans to impose a 20% charge on \u200ccargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz as “fundamentally wrong”. <\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald \u200cTrump said on Monday he had reinstated a blockade on Iranian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz \u200bthis month and proposed charging a 20% fee to help meet the cost of the U.S. safeguarding the vital waterway. <\/p>\n
“It would be fundamentally wrong to levy fees for passage through international waters,” Hapag said in a statement. <\/p>\n
The German Shipowners’ Association (VDR) said \u200csuch a measure would be \u2060legally impermissible and would undermine the principle of free passage through international waters. <\/p>\n
“Today it’s the Strait of Hormuz, tomorrow the Strait \u2060of Malacca, and the day after tomorrow the next international strait. Where will this end?” VDR head Martin Kroeger told business magazine Wirtschaftswoche in an interview on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Civilian commercial \u200bshipping \u200bmust not become a pawn in geopolitical \u200bconflicts, he added. <\/p>\n
Control of the Strait \u200cof Hormuz, a vital route for oil and gas supplies, has become one of the central flashpoints of the U.S.-Iran conflict. Iran’s effective blockade of the strait has pushed up energy prices and fuelled global inflation concerns. <\/p>\n
Hapag said that while fees can be justified to fund major infrastructure such as the Panama Canal \u200cand Suez Canal, the same argument did not \u200bapply to the Strait of Hormuz, which carried \u200babout a fifth of global \u200boil and gas supplies before the war. <\/p>\n
The Hamburg-based company, which raised \u200cits earnings outlook on Monday on \u200bstrong demand, told Reuters \u200bit could not reliably quantify the financial impact of Gulf tensions on its business. <\/p>\n
“The recent escalation currently has no additional immediate impact on our \u200bvessel operations,” said Hapag, \u200cwhich has adjusted its network so vessels don’t pass through the key \u200bwaterway. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Elke Ahlswede. Writing by Linda Pasquini and Miranda Murray. \u200bEditing by Matthias Williams and Mark Potter) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRANKFURT, July 14 (Reuters) – Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s fifth-largest container shipping company, on Tuesday criticised U.S. plans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[51940,38,1713,102,15754,101,22427],"class_list":["post-206081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-strait-of-hormuz","tag-container-shipping-company","tag-donald-trump","tag-hapag-lloyd","tag-hormuz","tag-international-waters","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-vdr"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}