Ambulance Chasers in the Maritime Industry

by David Matine

The maritime security industry is a new one, having only been in existence for not even a decade – in which time the few companies that started out initially, AdvanFort being one of them, have gradually come under attack by the smaller companies who have only recently formed.

The preferred tactic of these smaller companies is to attack the larger ones, such as AdvanFort, because they do not have the resources to actually compete with them in the market. How can a small fish attack a large one in the industry, you might ask? With the advent of the internet, almost anything is possible.

Small fish like David Stone of IAMSP, Martyn Benson of Campbrian Maritime, Daren Knight of Knight Associates Ltd, Paul Hickling of TCD Ltd, and Lars Bergqvist, who is currently unemployed, have been using social media websites to attack the credibility of AdvanFort for months now.

Yes, attacking a company online is possible, and it is really the only method of attack that smaller companies have when they don’t have the resources to win clients over on their own. Their method of thinking is: “Let’s make the big companies look bad so that maybe we stand a chance at getting a contract.”

Of course, that will not work for them, even if they are successful in creating a negative campaign against companies like AdvanFort, because they don’t have the resources that AdvanFort does, such as their own floating armories so as to prevent surprise attacks from pirates, which is completely possible with regular floating armories. So, actually they are just full of hot air.

The sad thing is their terrible behavior actually heightens when AdvanFort becomes the victim of a government’s unlawful arrest of guards of her ship. Rather than realize that real human beings are being detained, and imprisoned in questionable environments, they rejoice at the opportunity to spread negative publicity about a competitor, and say that they deserved everything that happened.

They are like those sleaze-ball attorneys who chase ambulances for a living, hoping to catch a case: someone fell down a defective escalator, maybe they lost a limb, but as long as they can make money off it they are willing to go after it. So they chase the victim in hopes of getting a case, regardless of how qualified they are to represent the victim.

People like them don’t care about people, they care about their own pockets, and nothing else. The perfect example of this is in India, October, 2013. AdvanFort vessel, SG OHIO was wrongfully detained by Indian authorities, and the small fish jumped on the internet social media sites to create a storm about how awful the owner is, and how terrible the company is, and so on.

What actually happened is the SG OHIO needed fuel, so they called for a fuel vendor to meet them in international waters. In the meantime typhoon Phailin was barreling down on everyone in sight. So the fuel vendors informed the SG OHIO that they could not go out any further. They asked if the AdvanFort vessel would come just a bit closer, but still outside of India’s borders, and when she did come a little bit closer to get the fuel, she was arrested for bringing weapons to India, even though she was in international waters, and was never in India at all.

Now people like that don’t actually care about the men who have been imprisoned, or what their conditions are like, or how they are being treated. They only want to create a storm online so that they can pocket any change that falls out of AdvanFort’s pockets as a result.

These are the ambulance chasing attorneys of the maritime industry who live off other people’s misfortunes.  AdvanFort is not like them, and never will be. AdvanFort cares about the quality of their work, and that is why the owner has actually invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this business.

The next time you read an article in the news about AdvanFort stop and think about the legitimacy of it. Who wrote it? Who does the author know on a personal level? Who paid him to write it? Don’t believe everything you read because behind every negative story is a motive. AdvanFort’s motive has been laid on the table: to provide maritime solutions for business clients. That’s it.

This blog post serves as but a small example, but we are confident that it will shed some light on the facts of our industry, and why you have heard such a thunderstorm about our company in the news lately.