My name is Christian Hernandez and I'm a partner at the longest established law firm in Gibraltar, ISOLAS, and I specialise in shipping matters.
Given Gibraltar's location at the entrance to the Mediterranean, the Gibraltar Port is one of the busiest shipping hubs in the Mediterranean, tracking over 100,000 vessels crossing the Straits of Gibraltar a year. Of this large number of vessels going past Gibraltar an average of 8,000 will call at Gibraltar, primarily with the purpose of taking on bunkers. The high volume of traffic and calls to Gibraltar by vessels of all shapes and sizes makes Gibraltar a very popular place for the arrest of vessels which are the subject of a dispute.
With the current economic climate, its probably just a matter of time before this kind of activity starts to pick up and, in the coming weeks, I'll be blogging about the shipping practice here at work and anything of any importance in shipping terms, happening in Gibraltar
