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Vincent Clerc says container ship attacks by Houthis could have ‘significant consequences’ for global growth

The boss of shipping giant AP Møller-Maersk has warned it could take months to reopen the crucial Red Sea trading route, risking an economic and inflationary hit to the global economy, companies and consumers.

Vincent Clerc, Maersk’s chief executive, told the Financial Times on Thursday that the closure of the Red Sea to most shipping after a series of attacks from Yemen’s Houthi militants was “brutal and dramatic”. He added there were “no winners” as a result of the situation, which has forced vessels to take long and costly detours around South Africa.

“It’s unclear to us if we are talking about re-establishing safe passage into the Red Sea in a matter of days, weeks or months . . . It could potentially have quite significant consequences on global growth,” he said.

Maersk is a bellwether of global trade, carrying about a fifth of ocean freight. Clerc urged the international community — led by the US — to do more to allow the Red Sea to reopen for ships following a recent escalation of attacks in the region.

A Maersk vessel was attacked in mid-December, causing the Danish group to suspend journeys through the Red Sea, a crucial link between Asia and Europe. The group restarted trips a few days later after a US-led military coalition tried to create safe passage, but it suffered a further attack at the end of December. Last week, Maersk said it would divert ships from the Red Sea around Africa “for the foreseeable future”.

Diverting container ships via the Cape of Good Hope adds about 13,000km in distance and hundreds of dollars per container, Clerc said.

“At this time when inflation is a big issue, it’s putting inflationary pressure on our costs, on our customers, and ultimately on consumers in Europe and the US,” he added. “In the short run, it could cause significant disruptions at the end of January, February and into March.”

Maersk’s fuel bill will be 50 per cent higher as a result of ships taking the longer route. If unresolved, ships will soon be out of position, threatening logistics and global supply chains, Clerc said.

“We are urging the international community to mobilise and do what it needs to do to reopen the [Bab-el-Mandeb] strait. It is one of the main arteries of the global economy, and it is clogged right now.

“It could have wider ranging consequences not only for the industry but for end consumers, product availability, the global economy as a whole,” he added.

Maersk’s share price has risen by a quarter in the past month as container freight rates have shot up.

Asked how it felt to be making more money from a situation that was hurting his customers and the global economy, Clerc replied: “Let me be completely unambiguous: our goal is to establish safe passage and go back to a normal trading pattern. That is what we are deploying all our assets in doing. While we are doing this, we have to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and there are consequences of this.”

He added that Maersk had little visibility over the security situation around the Red Sea as it was “morphing” all the time as well as being linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The modus operandi evolves. The type of weapon evolves. The geographical range expands. There are a lot of things for us that make the risk levels hard to assess. So we need to be prudent,” Clerc said.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a rising star in President Emmanuel Macron's party, says his Jewish father told him 'Perhaps you're Orthodox [Christian], but you'll feel Jewish all your life, mainly because you'll suffer antisemitism'

France's newest prime minister is getting attention for the two firsts he brings to the job: Gabriel Attal, at 34, is the country's youngest ever prime minister, and its first to be openly gay.

He says another facet of his identity also shapes him: his late father's Jewishness.

Attal's mother raised him and his siblings in her Russian Orthodox Christian faith. But his father, the film producer Yves Attal, was Jewish, born in Paris to Tunisian Jewish and European Jewish parents.

"My father said to me, 'Perhaps you're Orthodox, but you'll feel Jewish all your life, mainly because you'll suffer antisemitism because of your name,'" Attal told Liberation in 2019.

Attal is a common North African Jewish name and would be recognized as such in France, where there are large populations of Tunisian and Algerian Jews.

Attal told Le Monde last year that he is "not a stranger to transcendence" and still celebrates Orthodox Easter, but he no longer considers himself a religious believer in part because his father, who had relatives deported during the Holocaust, would tell him, "God died at Auschwitz."

Attal was named on an antisemitic poster displayed at a Paris protest during the pandemic. Attal was a government spokesperson at the time, and decried "absolutely abject comparisons" between Nazi persecution and public health measures, a theme of anti-vaccine protests.

A rising star in President Emmanuel Macron's center-right Renaissance party, Attal was education minister until Tuesday morning, when Macron selected him to replace Elisabeth Borne as prime minister.

Borne resigned over differences with Macron over immigration after Macron backed legislation that made it easier to deport foreigners in France.

Borne also derives a Jewish identity from her late father, a Holocaust survivor who died by suicide.

The previous youngest French prime minister is Laurent Fabius, a Socialist who was 37 when he started his two-year stint in 1984. Fabius was born to Jewish parents who converted to Roman Catholicism and raised him in that religion.

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