Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

Today, Panama, the Marshall Islands, and Liberia serve as the ostensible homes of more than a third of the global merchant fleet, and there are even flags of convenience available from places like Mongolia and Bolivia, landlocked countries with no actual maritime industries to speak of.

The first thing to know about Lloyd’s is that it doesn’t, in fact, sell insurance, and it never has. The name instead refers to an umbrella organization for hundreds of “members”—a mix of corporations and wealthy individuals—who actually provide policies, which are then said to have been sold at Lloyd’s.

Lloyd’s is the place where “storms and fires and floods and earthquakes, and every possible man-made calamity are systematically reduced to manageable routine,”

One reason the Lloyd’s market has historically been slow to tackle maritime fraud is that there is no real financial incentive to do so. Even though it costs money to compensate owners for scuttled ships, the market has evolved to respond efficiently to marine accidents, even faked ones, by passing on the cost to someone else. When

The Lloyd’s market was, in effect, an invitation-only investment club for preserving wealth and privilege.

Fairly or not, he saw a set of traits in Zavos that he’d encountered again and again in his dealings with corporate lawyers: absolute certainty, imperviousness to criticism, and a deep aversion to unpleasant conversations.

‘the game was not worth the candle’”—an obscure expression, coined before the advent of electricity, about avoiding card games with stakes lower than the expense of illuminating them.

Roughly 18 percent of the worldwide merchant fleet is Greek owned, a volume wildly out of proportion to the country’s overall economy, which is barely among the twenty largest in Europe. The marine assets controlled from Piraeus dwarf those held by Japan, with 11 percent of the total, and the US, with just 3 percent.