Importers worried with mystery of missing ship not solved in a month

The Panama-flagged ship MV Tan Binh 127 was coming to Chattogram port from Vietnam with 11,000 tonnes of steel worth Tk110 crore. The cargo ship was scheduled to reach Chattogram port on 4 August.

But on its way to Chattogram, the ship reportedly went missing off the coast of Myanmar. One month has passed since then, but the local agent and the owners of the ship have not provided accurate information about what happened to the ship.

This mystery around the incident has made importers in Bangladesh extremely worried as they have already submitted documents to Chattogram Custom House for customs clearance of the goods on board the ship.

On 3 August, the Myanmar Navy said in a notice that Tan Binh's master declared the ship abandoned at 90 nautical miles west of the Myanmar coast. The 18 sailors of the ship were rescued by the sailors of a container ship, the MCC Chittagong.

According to the website Marine Traffic which provides real-time information on the movement of ships, MV Tan Binh 127 was in the Malacca Straits connected to the Andaman Sea, the day before the accident. No further information was available about the ship.

Tanmoy Metal Industries Limited of Keraniganj had 519 metric tons of steel on board the MV Tan Bin 127.

Ratan Kumar Banik, managing director of the company, told The Business Standard (TBS), "The ship had 11,000 metric tons of steel worth around Tk110 crore belonging to various importers. Haque and Sons Ltd, the local shipping agent, has been giving inconsistent information from time to time. The ship was supposedly abandoned by the sailors. I can't even claim insurance because the owner of the ship has not declared the ship sunken. Our production is disrupted. We did not get our goods in hand and we are facing severe financial losses."

Matiul Islam, a senior operations officer at Haque And Sons Ltd, told TBS, "The ship was owned by Vietnamese company Tan Binh Company Ltd. The owner is not informing us whether the ship has sunk or got involved in any other accident. We have been contacting the ship owners regularly for the last one month, but they are not responding."

The ship also had goods for Sujan Enterprise of Hajibagh, Dhaka. Moazzem Hossain, the owner of the company, said, "The price of the imported goods has been paid to the Korean supplier, but I have not received the product yet."

Amir Hossain Nur Ali, senior vice-president of the Bangladesh Iron and Steel Merchants Association, said, "The owner's representative or the local agent is giving no information on whether the ship sank. The issue is of great concern to steel traders and the importers are facing extreme financial losses."