Reed Smith partners Nick Austin and Alex Brandt explore today’s challenges faced by the shipping industry and discuss key areas where we are likely to see the most activity in 2025, including sanctions, decarbonisation and legal developments in the courts. ----more---- Transcript:  Intro: Trading Straits brings legal and business insights at the intersection of the shipping and energy sectors. This podcast series offers trends, developments, challenges and topics of interest from Reed Smith litigation, regulatory and finance laws across our network of global offices. If you have any questions about the topics discussed on this podcast, please do contact our speakers. Nick: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Trading Straits. I'm Nick Austin, a partner in the shipping team at Reed Smith in London. I'm joined today by my friend and colleague, Alex Brandt, who's also a partner in the London shipping team. Alex and I both have the privilege, some would say, of working in an industry, the shipping industry, which is heavily impacted by markets, geopolitics, technological change, decarbonisation, and a raft of legal and regulatory changes, and no more so, I think, than now. So in this podcast, we're going to be looking in broad terms at what 2025 might hold in some of these areas. And with a particular eye on where as lawyers we're likely to see the most activity. We don't have a crystal ball, and we can't possibly cover everything today, but we do think there will be some themes that will continue to emerge throughout the year. So, Alex, if I can come to you first, I mean, I know that you spend, some would say, indecent amounts of time advising clients on sanctions in the maritime and commodities world. Russia has, of course, dominated the headlines in that regard. How do you see 2025 developing? Alex: Yeah, thanks, Nick. And it's nice to be back on Trading Straits. Yeah, well, look, as you say, 2024 was a big year for sanctions. And I think there were a couple of key themes that developed. The G7 really continued to clamp down on the trade and the transport of Russian oil. And I think having come up with a novel scheme, the G7 price cap, which allowed the carriage of Russian oil and support for that trade, albeit under sort of you know attestations and a regulated process what had happened from that was the emergence of the shadow fleet which is obviously dominated not just the trade news but but you know international news and particularly events going on in the baltic at the moment and so really you had this castle mouse game with the regulators concerned with the monster they'd created with the shadow fleet and trying to cut down on circumvention and that that really sort of you saw that in two ways. One is the guidance around the sale of tankers trying to stop vessels going into the shadow fleets. And the second is the increasing sanctioning of. Dark fleet, shadow fleet, parallel fleet actors, vessels, trading houses that have emerged in certain jurisdictions who are seen by the G7 as facilitating breaches of price cap and keeping that Russian oil flowing at levels that the G7 are uncomfortable with. So that's what 2024 was really framed by. 2025 from the sanctions landscape has already started with a bang. We had on the 10th of January, 183 more vessels designated by the US, a significant focus on Middle Eastern trading houses, focus on LNG projects by the US as well, and critically. Two large oil producers in Russia, Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas. We were only in the first month of January. Hard to know exactly where we'll end up with the Trump administration, But it's certainly the case, I think, that the first half of 2025 is going to see more of the same, more of a tightening on Russian oil, more of a tightening on circumvention, continued concern with the threat that the parallel fleet poses, not just from a sanctions perspective, but also safety environment. And now with this sort of the suggestion of sab