Malcolm Hartwell

Malcolm Hartwell is a shipping lawyer based in Durban. He specialises in admiralty shipping, international trade, marine insurance and all aspects of maritime casualties, in particular investigating the maritime aspects of cases involving salvage, collisions, grounding, flooding, fires, anchor dragging and cargo claims.

Malcolm acts for the majority of South African marine insurers and for numerous international insurers, law firms and P and I Clubs. He has experience in claims relating to water ingress, shortages, fires, refrigerated cargo, lashing failure, latent defects and insufficiency of packaging. These cases involve urgent Admiralty court proceedings to obtain arrest, interdict, discovery, production and access orders in South Africa and arbitration proceedings, particularly in London. He has obtained an arrest order for a US$40million charter party dispute, carried out due diligences on South Africa's leading ship repairers for a foreign investor and acted for cargo interests in investigating an engine room fire and subsequent transhipment exercise. He has run litigation and arbitration in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo and the DRC in the past few years alone. He has been involved in numerous disputes with and appeals to SARS on customs related problems.

Malcolm spent ten years at sea serving mainly on general cargo, bulk, refrigerated and container vessels on worldwide trades. He obtained his Master Mariner's Foreign Going Certificate of Competency before reading for his law degree at the University of Witwatersrand.

In addition to being a Master Mariner and an attorney in the High Court of South Africa, he is a non-practising solicitor of the courts of England and Wales. He is also a member of the Master Mariners Society, Durban Marine Insurance Association and the Maritime Law Association (MLA). He is President of the MLA and sits on a number of its technical sub-committees.

Malcolm is a director in the Admiralty Trade and Transport Division based in the Group’s Durban office and has been with the Group since 1994.