Mgm365_Phase_1

Due to Mrs. Lowell’s recent experience on her DWI cruise she has decided to file a suit against them if they don’t pay her 10 million dollars within 10 days. There are a lot of things that we need to look at in order to straighten this situation out; everything must be looked at in order to fix this situation completely. It is obvious that DWI and their employees should be responsible for the events that took place during the week, and therefore we need to get to the bottom of things to make sure that everything is handled right. To help us better understand what is going on I think we need to take a look at what a flag of convenience is. “A flag of convenience ship is one that flies the flag of a country other than the country of ownership.” (ITFglobal.org 2008) some reasons why ship owners do this is so that they can hire employees for cheaper, pay lower taxes, more flexible laws and so on. One of the main reasons ship owners use a flag of convenience is to utilize lower standards when it comes to owning and operating their ship. I believe that since DWI owns and operates the ship out of the United States their will be some legal ramifications that can be taken here, I also think that there will be some things that can be done in Liberia. Since they were in international waters at the time of the incident I would think that United States admiralty Jurisdictions would be applicable. Admiralty jurisdiction is when a vessel uses the flag of convenience that flag or country has the rights to jurisdiction. In this case it is the flag of Liberia so she would have to hope that this country would be willing to accept her allegations and they would take her seriously. The reason I say that I hope they take her seriously is because a lot of foreign countries deal with corruption and they bend the rules whenever possible. Since a lot of countries have a poorer economy and they aren’t as stable as the United States so they don’t have an iron clad law system. The main question I have is how this incident would play out if it happened in the United States. I know that there would be no question of who has jurisdiction over this case and things would probably play out a lot clearer. To stop this from happening in the future I would suggest that DWI stops flying a convenience and also do thorough background checks on all employees that are hired or going to be hired. If we can’t guarantee that our passengers are going to be safe then why would they want to use our services' This incident has caused a lot of damage to our reputation and it is going to be a while before we can repair it. References: ITFglobal.org (2008) International transport workers federation retrieved April 13, 2008 from: http://www.itfglobal.org/flags-convenience/sub-page.cfm members.aol.com (2008) MEANING OF ADMIRALTY JURISDICTION retrieved April 15, 2008 from: http://members.aol.com/dangelaw/admir3.html