Parties

Who is who on a fixture

Published 21 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

A single voyage has a dozen parties and a newcomer meets nearly all of them in the first week. Most of the early confusion comes from two collisions of vocabulary: several different companies get called the owner, and two entirely different companies get called the agent.

The three that sign

A charterparty is a contract between two parties, and identifying them correctly is the first line of the recap for a reason.

Party	What they are	What they carry
Charterer	The party hiring the ship	Pays freight or hire. May be the cargo’s seller, its buyer, or a trader who owns it only in transit. Often not the party whose cargo it appears to be.
Owner	The party letting the ship	Provides the ship, the crew and the seaworthiness. In a recap this word means whoever is letting her under this contract, which is frequently not the registered owner.
Disponent owner	Somebody holding her on charter and re-letting	Contracts as owner towards your charterer while being a charterer towards the party above. Common, and a fixture cares which one you have.

The word owner is doing two jobs there and it is worth separating them permanently. Who owns the hull is a different question with up to five answers of its own, and it is covered in its own guide. Who is owner under this charterparty is whoever signed as owner, and on a great many fixtures that is a disponent owner who does not own a single ship.

Two consequences follow immediately. A claim under the charterparty runs against the disponent owner, who may be a small company with nothing behind it, and not against the shipowner whose name gave everyone comfort. And the ship may sit under a chain of charters, each one a separate contract on different terms, so a delay at the discharge berth generates a demurrage claim at every link, each governed by its own wording and its own time bar.

The cargo, and the two ends of it

Party	What they are
Shipper	Whoever delivers the cargo to the ship at the load port and is named on the bill of lading. Often the seller, sometimes the seller’s supplier, occasionally the charterer itself.
Receiver	Whoever takes delivery at the other end, usually the buyer or its nominee. The party in practice controlling how fast the ship is discharged.
Notify party	Whoever the bill of lading says must be told the ship is coming. Frequently the receiver’s agent or bank, and not a party to the charterparty at all.

Whether the shipper or the receiver is your charterer is decided by the sale terms, not by the shipping documents. Under an FOB sale the buyer charters the ship, so the buyer is your charterer and the seller is the shipper. Under CFR or CIF the seller pays the freight, so the seller charters and the buyer is the receiver. That one distinction tells you which end of the trade is instructing you and which end will be complaining about the loading rate.

This is also where a subject comes from. An enquiry that reads sub shippers’ approval or sub receivers’ approval is telling you that your charterer cannot commit the ship until a party outside the negotiation has looked at her.

Aboard the ship

The master is a party to the fixture in practice even though the master signs nothing at the negotiation. Three of the documents a laytime claim depends on come from the ship, and all three are the master’s.

The notice of readiness. The master tenders it, and laytime starts from it subject to whatever the charterparty requires. A notice tendered in the wrong place, at the wrong hour, or before the ship was genuinely ready is where a large share of demurrage claims are lost.
The statement of facts. Prepared by the agent, signed by the master, and the evidence every laytime calculation is built on. A master who signs one under protest has preserved the owner’s position; a master who signs it without reading it has usually surrendered it.
The mate’s receipt and the bill of lading. What was actually loaded and in what apparent condition. Clausing here decides whether a cargo claim exists.

The master also answers to the technical manager for the ship’s operation and to the commercial manager for her employment, which is why an instruction from a broker to a master is normally improper. Instructions go through the party that controls her.

In the port

This is the second vocabulary collision. Two different companies are routinely called the agent and they act for opposite sides.

Party	Appointed by	Acts for
Port agent	Usually the charterer, under a charterer’s nomination clause	The ship. Clears her in, arranges pilots, tugs, berth, stores and paperwork, and issues the disbursement account.
Protective agent	The owner	The owner, watching the nominated agent in the owner’s interest. Paid by the owner and worth it where the terminal is the charterer’s own.
Stevedore	Whoever the cargo handling terms say pays	That party. Under FIOST that is the charterer, which is why stevedore damage becomes a charterer’s problem.
Surveyor	Either side, or jointly	Draught surveys for quantity, hold inspections before loading, on-hire and off-hire condition surveys.

The port agent is the trap. Nominated and paid for by the charterer, obliged in law to act for the ship, and the author of the statement of facts that will decide a demurrage claim between the two. The agent is not being dishonest when the record leans one way; the agent is writing down what the terminal told him. It is a reason to read the statement of facts on the day rather than months later, which is when everyone else reads it.

Behind the ship, and not on the fixture

Four more parties shape what happens without appearing in the recap. The flag state issues her certificates and the law of her registry follows her. The classification society certifies her hull and machinery and can suspend class, which stops her trading. The P and I club carries the owner’s liability cover for cargo claims, pollution and crew. And the port state control authority at the discharge port can detain her, which is the one item on this list that can stop a fixture performing outright.

The brokers, and why there is a chain

There is rarely one broker. A typical fixture has an owner’s broker and a charterer’s broker, and frequently one or two intermediaries between them who each know only the party next to them.

Chains form because access is unevenly distributed. A broker who has the charterer does not have the ship, and the broker who has the ship cannot reach the charterer, so the two of them trade what they have. It is ordinary commerce, and it has three consequences a newcomer should expect.

Information degrades at every hop. A laycan or a quantity gets rounded, a term gets paraphrased, and by the third retelling the enquiry no longer matches the one the charterer sent. The details that stay intact are the ones nobody bothers rewording: the stowage factor, the exact demurrage figure, the discharge options.
The principal is hidden until it is not. An enquiry says first class receivers, full style on firm, meaning the name comes when an offer is made firm. Full style is the legal name and address as it will appear in the charterparty, and it is asked for because you cannot check whether a counterparty pays until you know who it is.
Commission is split down the chain and is only earned when the deal concludes. Everyone in it has the same incentive and a different amount of information.

The convention that holds a chain together is that you deal with the party next to you and do not go around them. Contacting the far principal directly is the fastest way to be cut out of every subsequent enquiry, and desks remember it for years. It is not a rule anyone has written down and it is enforced completely.

Getting the parties right on the record

Almost every party above answers a question somebody will ask later. Who owes the demurrage, which is the disponent owner and not the shipowner. Who slowed the discharge, which is the receiver and not the charterer you were speaking to. Who signed the statement of facts. Who nominated the agent.

A desk that records one Owner field and one Charterer field against a fixture cannot answer any of them, and the answers are needed exactly when the fixture has gone wrong and the people who were there have moved on.

References

FONASBA (Federation of National Associations of Ship Brokers and Agents), Documentation. fonasba.com
BIMCO, GENCON 2022 voyage charter party, 2022. bimco.org
BIMCO, CMI, FONASBA and the Baltic Exchange, Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013, 2013. fonasba.com
IMO, Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic (FAL), 1965. imo.org
IACS (International Association of Classification Societies). iacs.org.uk
International Group of P&I Clubs. igpandi.org

Who owns a shipA hull has up to five companies behind it and they are not interchangeable. Only one of them answers a chartering e-mail. The fixture recapThe e-mail that says what was agreed. Written in minutes, read by a tribunal years later, and the contract until the charterparty is drawn. What a ship broker doesThe job itself: two lists nobody publishes, a market with no screen, and a commission earned only when a deal concludes. The statement of factsThe agent’s timed record of everything that happened in port. Every demurrage claim is decided on it, long after anyone was watching.

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