The United Nations Office in Sri Lanka has raised concerns over the Singapore shipping company, X-Press Feeders’ refusal to honour Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court order of US$1B in compensation for the X-Press Pearl disaster.
In a statement on ‘X’, the UN Office in Sri Lanka said the refusal to honour Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court order is deeply concerning.
“We urge the shipping company to review the scale of damages to people, coasts and marine life, and to uphold justice for communities and the ecosystem,” it added.
The appeal comes after the X-Press Feeders chief executive, Shmuel Yoskovitz, said he believed paying would have wide-ranging implications on global shipping and “set a dangerous precedent”.
Rejecting the open-ended nature of the penalty, Yoskovitz told AFP, “We are not paying because the whole base of maritime trade is based on the limitation of liability. This judgment undermines this limitation of liability.”
“Any payment towards the judgment could set a dangerous precedent for how maritime incidents will be resolved in the future,” he said.
The chief executive again apologised for the incident, saying the company recognised the disaster and was trying to make amends.
The company operated the MV X-Press Pearl that sank off Colombo Port in June 2021 after a fire, believed to have been caused by a nitric acid leak, that raged for nearly two weeks.
Its cargo included 81 containers of hazardous goods, including acids and lead ingots, and hundreds of tonnes of plastic pellets. The ship was refused permission by ports in Qatar and India to offload the leaking nitric acid before it arrived in Sri Lankan waters.
Tons of microplastic granules from the ship inundated an 80km stretch of beach along Sri Lanka’s western coast. Fishing was prohibited for months.
Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court in July ordered the company to pay Colombo an “initial” US$1 billion in damages within a year, with the first tranche of US$250 million to be paid by Tuesday. (Newswire)
The refusal to honour Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court order of US$1B in compensation for the #XPressPearl disaster is deeply concerning.
We urge the shipping company to review the scale of damages to people, coasts & marine life and to uphold justice for communities & the eco-system. https://t.co/LFEBMpvsDL
— UN in Sri Lanka (@UNSriLanka) September 23, 2025