Ships carrying steel reinforcing bars and plywood to a port on the Arabian Sea were, for several years, routinely subjected to bogus, multi-million dollar cargo claims by a local cartel of importers. I worked with the local embassy of a flag state to successfully persuade the Provincial Governor to intervene to stop this extortion overnight.

At the end of the warlord era in Somalia, I was asked by the UN World Food Programme to make front line assessments of the surviving capabilities of ports in Mogadishu, El Maan and Kismayo, and by the Somali regional government in Galmudug to do a similar assessment of the central Somalia beach port at Hobyo.

These projects involved front line surveys followed by outreach programmes to engage with local stakeholders and to understand their interests, and then to package these findings into actionable reports which the clients could use to solicit funds for fast infrastructure upgrades to support local food security initiatives and employment.

Significant investment in Mogadishu and Kismayo ports followed directly from these projects. However, since the central Somali coast was under the control of pirates at the time of my visit, it has taken longer for the opportunities I identified at Hobyo to be acted on, but I can report that these are now underway.

I was retained to mentor and support an inexperienced negotiating team in a developing nation through multiple rounds of negotiation with a powerful group of distant water fishing nations to determine the terms of access for the group’s fishing boats to the developing nation’s own Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ).

Giving them a more structured negotiating platform and greater confidence helped the team to expand the scope of the agenda. So, instead of being a rather limited and formalistic exercise involving broad acceptance of the terms offered to them, the team were empowered to broaden the negotiations to discover and discuss much wider areas of common interest for both sides, including the local blue economy, employment and the environment.

Since 2012, my team and I have delivered comprehensive assistance to shipowners confronted by ship hijack and crew kidnap in the Gulf of Guinea. This includes a fully compliant local operation of experienced representatives for on-the-ground logistics, which we manage both from the shipowner’s Emergency Response Team and through our own people that we deploy to the country.

I was working onshore in Somalia for various P&I Clubs and UN agencies before Somali piracy broke out around 2004.

In the years that followed, I was therefore well placed to provide informed local advice and comprehensive negotiation support to many shipowners and flag states to help them cope with the trauma and complexity of hijack situations, and secure safe and successful outcomes.