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  • 2020-03-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Are Most Cruise Ships Registered Under Foreign Flags? (de)
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  • As the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic of March 2020 threatened to shut down businesses across America for an extended period of time, the U.S. government faced the difficult task of deciding which industries should be provided economic assistance to keep them afloat for the duration. Public sentiment in some quarters was strongly against government bailouts for businesses such as airlines and cruise companies, on the grounds that over the last several years many of the major operators had spent billions of dollars in profits buying up their own stock rather than paying down their debts. In USA Today, John M. Griffin and James M. Griffin wrote: A widely circulated meme on social media offered another reason why cruise lines were supposedly unworthy of government bailouts -- because although they might be headquartered in the U.S., their ships were foreign-flagged in order to put them out of reach of U.S. law: That nearly every major cruise line registers their ships somewhere outside the U.S. is hardly a disputable point. As a 2011 news report noted, only a single major cruise ship at the time was U.S.-flagged: The three cruise lines called out by name in the meme -- Disney, Celebrity, and Carnival -- do indeed engage in this practice. It's not difficult to verify that Disney cruise ships are registered in the Bahamas, Celebrity ships in Malta, and Carnival ships in Panama. Of course, the cruise industry and their critics offer differing reasons for why cruise ships are flagged in countries other than the U.S., with the former asserting that: On the other hand, an academic paper by Caitlin E. Burke of the University of Florida about Legal Issues Relevant to Cruise Ships made no bones of observing that reflagging of ships had long been used as a means of avoiding U.S. federal taxes, labor and safety laws, environmental laws, lawsuits, criminal investigations, and other regulations: That the practice of ship-reflagging is common and regular is undeniable. Whether cruise lines headquartered in the U.S. but operating ships registered in foreign countries deserve government bailouts in a time of pandemic is a subjective issue with no definitive answer, but certainly some critics have argued that they do not: (en)
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