Opinion ID: 3046278
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Stevedore Contracts

Text: FTS presented no evidence of contractual commitments to provide stevedore services to any shipper or cruise line at the Port of Miami. But abundant evidence established that shippers and cruise lines would not entertain stevedoring contract proposals if a stevedore lacked the requisite stevedore permit. Malins-Smith, president of Seafreight Agencies, U.S.A., explained that “[i]t wouldn’t be prudent business practice” to enter into a contract with a stevedore company if that company did not have a permit. Royal Caribbean also would not have considered a proposal from a stevedore that did not hold a Port of Miami stevedore permit. Carnival operations manager Sutcliffe said that “one of the first questions that we would ask” of a potential stevedore was “[a]re you licensed or permitted to operate?” Tom Paelinck of Seaboard Marine expressed similar reservations. Paelinck spoke with FTS’s Gorman in 1998 or 1999 about the possibility of FTS providing stevedore services for Seaboard Marine at the Port of Miami. Paelinck said, “[T]he 48 Bastian derived these lost-profit figures from per-passenger revenue and cost data and rates based on FTS’s stevedore work for Disney Cruise Lines at Port Canaveral. Bastian’s lostprofit figures for cruise lines assumed that FTS would have provided stevedore service for one ship in 2003, two ships in 2004 and three ships in 2005, and did not reflect stevedoring for any particular cruise line. 77 Case: 11-10475 Date Filed: 12/28/2012 Page: 78 of 81 question was always, do you have a permit to operate? If you don’t have a permit, then we can . . . have a conversation, but you can’t really negotiate anything until you have the tools to operate.” Paelinck continued, “If somebody comes up to me and says, ‘I’d like to do your stevedoring,’ before we even start talking about the prices, we got to talk about . . . can you do this? Do you have the permit? Do you have the license?”