Diageo News

The Scottish Maritime Museum has successfully bid for an 80-year-old bottle of whisky salvaged from one of Scotland’s most famous shipwrecks and the inspiration for the Ealing Studio comedy Whisky Galore!The unlabelled bottle of blended whisky from the 1923 SS Politician, which ran aground off the Isle of Eriskay in 1941, was acquired by the Scottish Maritime Museum with the support of the National Fund for Acquisitions at The Grand Whisky Auction.The rare find will become part…

Dutch company WEC Lines is to begin weekly calls at the Port of Liverpool from February 10th, providing a new option for shippers looking to access central and northern UK markets. The brand new service will connect Liverpool with Lisbon, Setubal, Leixoes and Sines and vice versa, with other links to Ireland, Scotland, Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands. WEC Lines said: “This is a major new development for us, offering a dedicated, faster and direct container service for our customers in the Iberian peninsula, north Africa and the Canaries.

Peel Ports, one of Britain's largest port operators, expects to withstand the container shipping slump with a bold project aimed at attracting cargo to Liverpool away from southern gateways, its chief executive said. The container market, which ships retail goods from iPhones to designer clothes and food products, has been hit hard by a slowdown in demand for goods from Asia, especially China. The Baltic exchange's main sea freight index, which gauges the cost of shipping dry bulk commodities such as coal, has fallen to the lowest level since data is available on the China slowdown. Peel Ports, which competes with Associated British Ports…

Peel Ports announced that it has secured 50 advocates for its Cargo200 initiative and is urging other shippers in the North-west to add their weight to the campaign. Launched in May, Peel Ports called for importers and exporters whose goods began or ended their journey in the north of the UK to switch current delivery of ocean freight from south-east ports to the centrally-located Port of Liverpool. The initiative aims to cut freight mileage by 200 million miles over the next five years. In addition to achieving significant carbon reduction, the company also estimates that the move could save shippers up to £400 per container in transportation costs by delivering to the heartland of the UK.

Peel Ports has today (Thursday 19 November) announced that it has secured 50 advocates for its Cargo200 initiative and is urging other shippers in the North-west to add their weight to the campaign. Launched in May, Peel Ports called for importers and exporters whose goods began or ended their journey in the north of the UK to switch current delivery of ocean freight from south-east ports to the centrally-located Port of Liverpool. The initiative aims to cut freight mileage by 200 million miles over the next five years. In addition to achieving significant carbon reduction, the company also estimates that the move could save shippers up to £400 per container in transportation costs by delivering to the heartland of the UK.

Huntington Ingalls Industries’ (HII) board of directors has elected Kellye Walker to serve as corporate vice president and general counsel and Charles R. “Chuck” Monroe Jr. to serve as corporate vice president, associate general counsel and secretary. These organizational changes are effective Jan. 12, 2015. As corporate vice president and general counsel, Walker will report to HII President and CEO Mike Petters and will have overall leadership responsibility for HII’s law department and outside counsel…

It is impossible to view the global container shipping business without looking at it through the prism of vessel capacity being added to the market. What happens over the next two years will be a direct result of the glut of newbuildings that are flooding into service and wrecking freight rates. Just consider these numbers. During the first four months of 2013, Alphaliner puts the new containership deliveries at 496,000 TEUs. According to data supplied by PR News Service ComPort, almost 250,000 TEUs of that will be comprised of vessels with a nominal capacity of 10,000 TEUs and up.

BIMCO has announced that its new Secretary General/CEO to succeed Mr Torben C. Skaanild on his retirement later this year will be Mr Angus R. Frew, currently Chief Executive of the UK Chamber of Shipping. The appointment of Mr Frew was unanimously approved last week by the BIMCO Executive Committee at its meeting in Shanghai. It is expected that Mr Frew, who will be relocating to Denmark, will take up his appointment on 1st October 2013. Mr Skaanild will continue in a support role to the new Secretary General, and the incoming President of BIMCO, for a period of six months thereafter.

At the annual shareholders meeting of Carnival Corporation & plc  held in Miami Beach, Fla., shareholders elected a new member to the company's board of directors – Debra Kelly-Ennis, president and chief executive officer of Diageo Canada, Inc. Kelly-Ennis will serve in a non-executive capacity on Carnival Corporation & plc's 14-member board, effective immediately. Carnival Corporation & plc's board of directors also approved a quarterly dividend to holders of Carnival Corporation common stock and Carnival plc ordinary shares of $0.25 per share.

Aberdeen Harbour Board has appointed James Bell as finance director following the recent retirement of Graeme Clark after 26 years service. Bell joins the Board from the Caledonian Brewing Company, a subsidiary of Heineken UK, where he was head of finance since 2002. A graduate of Dundee University, Bell initially trained with Bird Simpson, Chartered Accountants, and spent seven years with Meston Reid & Co before joining Diageo in 2001.

Manpower Software plc (MSW) today announces the award of two contracts for the sale of its Maritime Crew Administration product to Royal Caribbean Cruises Limited (RCCL) and Sun Cruises Limited (SCL), the subsidiary of Airtours plc. These contract awards follow on from the recent sales of MSW's Crew Task Scheduling product to RCCL and the Access Control product, "Souls on Board," to SCL. MSW was also granted two contracts for the sale of its Workforce Planning product to Guinness UDV Limited (part of the Diageo group of companies) and BP Shipping Limited (a division of BP plc). The initial value of the four contracts is in excess of $2.2 million. RCCL has purchased MSW's Maritime Crew Administration product as part of an enterprise-wide program of improvement.