Peter Swift To Receive Lifetime Achievement Award
IMO Secretary-General Efthimios Mitropoulos will present Dr Peter Swift, managing director, INTERTANKO, with a special Tanker Shipping & Trade Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tanker Safety Conference, November 11 – November 12, London. The Tanker Safety Conference is an annual event that exclusively focuses on safety and security issues facing the tanker segment.
“It is a great honour to receive this award after nearly 50 years in the shipping business, almost entirely built around oil, chemical and gas tankers,” says Dr Swift. “It is also pleasing to note that the tanker industry over the last decade has been able to restore its credibility and reputation that were seriously dented following the high profile Erika and Prestige, and that this sector routinely champions best practice and respect for our seafarers.”
Dr Swift was appointed in February 2001 as Managing Director of INTERTANKO (The International Association of Independent Tanker Owners), which represents the interests of more than 250 oil/chemical tanker owners and a further 300 associate members from the broader shipping industry. As managing director of INTERTANKO he was very much involved in the aftermath of the Erika and the Prestige incidents and all their political and regulatory consequences, as well as in the effects on the tanker industry of single-hull phase-out, both of which meant working with the effects of growing EU influence on the IMO.
In particular, he was instrumental in establishing the now highly successful annual Tripartite talks between ship owners, shipbuilders and class, which provided inter alia a unique forum for the initial discussion of the IACS Common Structural Rules. These rules had themselves emanated from the drive which Swift and others in INTERTANKO and OCIMF led to produce higher uniform design and construction standards for tanker structures. He has also been at the forefront of the fight against unilateral regulation of shipping and for uniformity at a consistently high level across all of the industry’s governance structures, from regulation to port state control, flag administration and classification.