Page 393 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS173 Athanasios Petralias et al.
vessel and also receives the loan drawdowns and pays capital installments and
interest. Also, the ship owning company pays dividends to the shareholders.
In case a mother-holding company exists, it is typically the mother-holding
company who distributes the dividends to the shareholders, after collecting
the earnings from all the SPCs/SPVs of the group.
Economic owner of the vessel (i.e. the good, which is associated with
imports/exports and the capital costs) is the legal owner (SPC/SPV). The ship
management company acts for and on behalf of the ship owning company
(SPC/SPV). However the ship management company provides the commercial
operation of the vessel, i.e. the transport service and is responsible for the
commercial decisions concerning the employment of the ship, and provides
also management services.
The second step is to define the population of vessels to be included in the
cluster. In order to define the population and estimate the relevant items of
the Balance of Payments we have used an exhaustive list of databases,
domestic and international, and additional valuable information from relevant
maritime legislation, governmental sources and shipping experts both from
the academia and the industry. The main data-sources used include IHS
Maritime and Trade and Lloyd’s List intelligence databases, providing monthly
data on a vessel basis for various types of ownership, vessel characteristics,
new deliveries/deaths, crew and port movement; Ministry of Mercantile
Marine, Aegean and Island policy data with a list of the management
companies established in the country; Clarksons Shipping Intelligence
Network with detailed monthly time charter rate data by type of vessel and
size; Drewry with data regarding operating expenses by vessel type and build
year; World Bunker Prices and pricing policy of largest ports worldwide which
is available in their websites. Note that whenever a variable appears in more
than one database, cross-validations are performed. The above are the main
data-sources used for the needs of the compilation of Balance of Payments
items. Various other databases were also consulted for developing the Greek
Shipping Estimation Model, including the Greek Shipping Directory, a
traditional domestic database for Greek shipping; Bloomberg; Greek Maritime
Laws; BIMCO types of agreements; UNCTAD; ITF types of agreements; Petrofin;
data collected by companies involved in the shipping sector and other.
For each vessel there exist one or many linked companies, including the
legal (registered) owner, the shipmanager, the commercial operator, the
beneficial owner and potentially the technical manager and/or the third party
operator. The relationships among the different players are very complex and
identifying their roles is not always easy, having in mind that in the commercial
databases are used definitions and terminology not always aligned with the
statistical ones.

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