This was an appeal from Siem Offshore Redri AS v Altus Uber (CMI377). The appellant argued that the Admiralty (Jurisdiction and Settlement of Maritime Claims) Act 2017 (the Admiralty Act) did not permit the securing by a maritime claim of an arbitration that has no nexus with India.

Held: Appeal dismissed.

The Admiralty Act is a special Act. However, it is not a self-contained code, unlike the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996. There are several other statutes which deal with arrest and detention of ships and maritime claims, notably the Merchant Shipping Act 1956, the Indian Ports Act 1908, the Major Port Trusts Act 1963 etc. The Admiralty Act only deals with what constitutes a maritime claim and arrest of ships to secure maritime claims. The Act does not provide for what is required to be done after a ship is arrested to secure a maritime claim and the owner enters appearance and submits to the jurisdiction. The Act is silent on the procedure to be followed in the event that disputes are to be referred to arbitration. Consequently it is open to the Court to look outside the Admiralty Act and adopt and apply general law principles and broadly accepted international procedure to evolve a procedure which involves interplay between actions in rem and arbitration so as to advance the cause of justice and which is not prohibited by domestic law. No statute caters to every fact situation. The submission that what is not provided is impliedly excluded, is not correct.

The fallacy in the argument of the appellants lies in presuming that the Court has been approached by the plaintiff only to obtain security for the arbitration proceedings commenced in London. Far from it, the present suit is filed to enforce a maritime claim and that is clear from a reading of the plaint as a whole. It is well settled that the allegations have to be read as a whole and in their entirety. After setting out the background, the plaint proceeds to say that this is an in rem action for enforcement of the plaintiff's maritime claim. Counsel for the appellants' argument presumes that because there is a pending arbitration abroad, by its sheer pendency the present suit is barred. For that purpose, he says that this suit is filed to obtain security for the claim in the arbitration which is going on abroad. The Court has already said that this is not how the claim is founded. His arguments proceed on the erroneous basis that pendency of the arbitration proceedings abroad by itself and without anything more bars the filing of the suit. That is not the accurate position.