ONBOARD Magazine summer 2021

law. He explains, “If your yacht is registered in the Cayman
Islands via a Cayman company and you are sitting in the USA,
you probably don’t think you need to worry too much about
employment law but you’d be wrong.” In fact, any yacht that
spends considerable time on the French coast or has French
based crew is subject to mandatory rules of employment law.
Says Charlier, “That means that if there is a dispute between
a crew member and an employer, the crew member can go to
an employment tribunal, start an action of unfair dismissal and
it’s fairly easy in France to go and arrest the yacht as security
for your employment.” It’s Charlier’s job to defend the yacht
owner from arrest and employment actions brought on behalf
of the disgruntled crew member.
Sometimes you get a call from someone
asking a lot of questions about VAT
and some time into the conversation
you realise that actually what they are
interested in is buying a yacht!
Tom Kelly, Partner at Preston Turnbull LLP works mostly with
yachts during the build stage or soon after. The most common
concerns he deals with are; disputes over responsibility for
particular aspects of a project or work done by subcontractors,
delays in the schedule/delivery of a yacht, problems that arise
after delivery in terms of quality or performance – especially
where the yacht has agreed various items or arrangements, but
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does not get the quality it wanted or the owner has a change
of mind, which can get expensive.
Charlotte van Steenderen at Mainport Lawyers deals with both
transactional and dispute resolution work. She says, “Common
questions and issues are in respect of the wording of letters
of intent, build slot agreements and yachting construction
agreements.” She gets asked things like: Is there any binding
effect of the letter of intent? If so, to what extent are parties
bound and which part is still open for negotiation? How do you
deal with VAT on owner’s supplies? She’s also quizzed on shipyard
bankruptcy and what to do if the yacht fails on achieving certain
performance criteria (speed, noise and vibrations, range etc.).
Expert Edouard Mousny at Gordon Blair is asked a similar range
of questions, working as he does from yacht purchase onwards.
He says, “The most common concerns are in relation to, on the
contractual side, the warranties provided by the Builder/Seller
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