A Samoan businessman says he will take legal action against a Government shipping company that he says has been overtaken by foreign interests after cutting routes that will hit exporters hard. 

In 2012, the Samoan Government boasted that it had acquired a 100 per cent stake in the Pacific Forum Line (P.F.L) company from 11 other Pacific Governments as a means of prioritising imports and exports to Samoa. 

But the Government's stake was soon diluted, when two years later Neptune Pacific Direct Line (N.P.D.L.) acquired half of the company; two yeas later, court documents show; the deal was held up as a “beacon of regional trade and development in the region.”

That stake in P.F.L. has led to the creeping control of P.F.L. which is now working against Samoa's business interests, exporter and manufacturer Papalii Grant Percival says.

Early last month in a letter to clients describing a “Samoa and Tonga Service Upgrade,” Samoan businesses learned they could expect just one ship from N.P.D.L. every 18 days, something the letter called an “exciting service development.”

That has drawn an angry response from some local businesses that are questioning how what is meant to be a Government-owned enterprise is now cutting shipping routes to Samoa. 

Previously, Samoa had two services a month from Australia, and fortnightly services from Auckland. 

Under the new regime announced by the company, Tonga will be having a service every nine days starting this month, with weekly trips between Tonga and Fiji and Auckland and Tonga.

Papalii says after immense congestion in Auckland’s port is factored in, that 18 days could stretch much longer, leaving Samoa with a significant drop in services from a once-weekly operation.

He says the local industry was not consulted on the changes before they happened and received no advance notice. He says his own company is set to miss out on about $2 million this year in access to the Australian market, which he is already certified to service with fresh produce.

“These things don’t happen overnight, they take time. You sign up these contracts for a year or two years, so they knew what was coming at least a year ago and they didn’t plan for it,” Papalii said. 

“We’re giving Neptune the right to plan for us, when they can’t plan? The incompetence is supreme; I have never seen anything so bad.

“Why be the 50 per cent owner and serve Fiji, Tonga, Rarotonga, and not Samoa? Why not just sell your shares, walk away from it, and say we are at the mercy of the market?”

Approached for comment, P.F.L. Director Tupuola Koki Tuala and General Manager Jason Perry have said they would respond in due course.

The Prime Minister’s office was approached earlier this week and has not responded to a request for comment.

Papalii said he has been in contact with Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi, who allegedly indicated his own concern with the situation and wants it resolved. 

P.F.L., managed by a company called Neptune, is half-owned by the Government of Samoa and half-owned by N.P.D.L. which is part of a transnational company that also owns FIJI Water, and acquired Pacific Direct Line (P.D.L.) in 2020 (it was known then as Neptune Pacific Line). 

(The half that is owned by N.P.D.L. is registered to a company called N.P.T. Agency, a Fijian shipping agency registered in Vanuatu.Samoa sold it to Neptune Pacific Line for an undisclosed sum in 2013.)

At the time, then Deputy Prime Minister and P.F.L. Chairman Fonotoe Pierre Lauofo said the sale: “ensures trade security and continuity for the Samoan people, as well as the Pacific Forum nations that P.F.L. was created to serve, and also reinforces the employment of Samoan seafarers on ships around the world.”

Papalii believes the Government should have intervened when N.P.L. moved to buy P.D.L. having already had the 50 per cent stake in P.F.L., because it now effectively monopolises the shipping trade between Australia and the Pacific and is no longer serving Samoa’s interests.

“Government should have stepped in and said ‘I am sorry, but you can no longer be the operator of the service, […] you can operate in competition with P.F.L. but you are no longer 50 per cent shareholders,’” he said. 

This did not appear to have happened.

Now, he wants to seek an injunction to stop the new schedule from going ahead because the company didn’t seek Government approval to be a monopoly in line with Samoa’s Fair Trading Act.

“The reality is that right now we own the shipping company and we have been given the really short end of the stick,” he said.

“I know ever since N.P.D.L.’s taken over it has gone downhill like a rocket, it’s as if they don’t give a damn. They don’t even care that we exist in the market, and we are partial owners.

“If they owned it completely, I would have accepted it, but as a Samoan taxpayer I want answers.”

On top of the service reduction, those monthly P.F.L. ships will skip Australia and only go to Auckland, where the port has become so congested that ships wait an average of nine days at sea before docking and unloading, according to Stuff.co.nz.

Tauranga Port has become just as congested at times with ships flocking there to avoid problems in Auckland.

Already in 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern revealed Cabinet agreed to move the Ports of Auckland, saying the question was “not it, but where and when it will move.”

Meanwhile, Papalii said: “congestion will increase, delays will increase. What N.P.D.L. is proposing is we put everything through Auckland, all the services from Australia will be hubbed in Auckland and sent to us. Auckland is congested, you should know that, don’t come through Auckland!”

Papalii said the new schedule is at odds with Samoa’s own policy goals to ramp up agriculture exports and value-added product exports.

“If you can’t get to the market because the Government’s shipping line has decided you will not be going through them, how will you get to market?

“Australia is the biggest market in Australasia […] I know S.A.M.E. and Chamber are both talking about the need to increase markets and increase access, well what the Government’s own shipping company is doing is doing the exact opposite.”

P.F.L. has told Papalii it has not removed access to Australia. But a look at its Australia schedule says the opposite.

The Southern Moana 31 was scheduled to leave Melbourne for Samoa (via Sydney, Brisbane, Lautoka, and Suva) on March 30, and is scheduled to reach Samoa on April 20, before returning to Melbourne on May 05.

But on its New Zealand schedule, the Southern Moana (32) is scheduled to leave Auckland on April 27, just six days after it berths in Samoa, and then be back in Samoa on May 05, just one day before it is meant to be in Melbourne.

Papalii says this schedule could only work with magic.

“The incompetence is unreal. So you have no idea whether you can send to Australia and how long it’s going to take.

“They are promising they will get it to Australia but they are not showing us how or when. There is no way that boat is getting to Australia. Distance aside, it can’t be six days in Australia when it is coming into Tonga from Auckland, the ship can’t be in two places at once. 

In his letter to the Prime Minister, Papalii said he recommends for the P.F.L. management to be sacked.

“I am talking to supermarkets and they are saying when is it coming, and I say you’ll have to throw a penny up and see what happens if it’s heads or tails, I have no idea. 

“And they go, are you kidding, do we want a supplier that doesn’t know what’s happening?”

He says now that N.P.D.L. and P.F.L. offer just one ship to Samoa a month, the country’s businesses are faced with a “Hobson’s choice,” of working with P.F.L. or not shipping at all, especially if they want their goods to reach Australia.

When Papalii raised this with Tupuola, the P.F.L. director said because Matson Navigation, Sofrana ANL and Swire Shipping also offer services between Samoa and Australia and New Zealand, this is not true.

But Papalii insists that between the latter two only hiring space on other container ships, and Matson Navigation’s service being significantly slow, it is.

“If you sent anything on the Matson line you took the long route, because it goes from here to Niue, to Tonga, to all over the place, before it went back to New Zealand, so you really had a Hobson’s choice: either you went with P.F.L. or P.D.L. or you didn’t go in a timely manner,” he says.

“Swire and the other carriers have bought space on the N.P.D.L., the P.F.L./P.D.L. service. They are supposedly in the market but the reality is there is only one carrier, and that is P.F.L., and P.F.L. has ceded management to N.P.D.L..

“In a situation where you get a monopoly like this you have to seek permission to operate a monopoly service, and they did not seek permission and they started the operation.

Papalii’s Natural Foods Incorporated expected to double output this year to around 78 containers (or twenty-foot equivalent units), and he believes the changes to Samoa’s shipping services will reverse this growth.

“We need to know the whole background. Who is Neptune and why are they managing our national shipping company?"