Michael Howard QC has published an article on the Supreme Court decision in The Renos in the August issue of Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly. 

If the cost of repairing a ship after a casualty exceeds the insured value, her owners may claim for a constructive total loss. In The Renos, a ship was salved on Lloyd’s Form incorporating SCOPIC. It was common ground that the cost of salvage which enabled the ship to be taken to port and repaired could in principle be brought into the calculation as an expense necessary to achieve the repair. Hull insurers contended that SCOPIC payments were to be excluded from the calculation because (i) they were incurred before the Notice of Abandonment was given, and (ii) in any event they were not true salvage expenses. They failed on the first question, but succeeded on the second. This article argues that the Supreme Court was right on the first question and wrong on the second.

Read the full article in [2020] LMCLQ 433. (subscription required)