I have always thought that Pirates were a thing of the past meaning that they were only in movies and television shows not actually sailing around the world right now. I mean really, I don’t think there are Captain Jack Sparrows just hanging out in the Caribbean Sea causing chaos with other ships.
Well after reading the news headlines last week on Yahoo and discussing with Mike one night after work, I stand corrected. Apparently piracy is still a major concern among shipping companies around the world. The pirates in the Yahoo stories were off the coast of Somalia and had taken over a rather large ship and were holding a standoff with authorities. Then Mike was telling me about how the client he is currently auditing just had a pirate “incident” back in August or September of this year. Mike was hearing from one of his staff who found out during a routine inventory observation so we don’t know the entire story first hand. Just that pirates attacked a container ship coming from Asia and they had to do some negotiating and paying off the pirates to get their ship and cargo back. We were wondering what the appropriate accounting treatment and disclosure would be on that. “Extraordinary item: Pirate negotiation fee” or maybe “Operating Expense: Pirates”. Either way we were both a little surprised at how wide spread this issue really is. Either way it is fascinating and scary at the same time.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Hi. I am a long time reader. I wanted to say that I like your blog and the layout.
Peter Quinn