This was a cassation appeal against the judgment delivered on 28 September 2023 by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal (Chamber 3-1), in the dispute between the appellant insurers and the respondent CMA-CGM (CMI2290).

A Senegalese company, Société de Cultures Légumières (SCL), entrusted maritime transport between Senegal and UK of several containers of sweetcorn, packed in bulk, to CMA-CGM, which issued a bill of lading on 28 April 2017. Upon receipt on 10 May 2017, reservations were made about the corn in one of the containers. An expert appraisal attributed the damage to temperature variations recorded within this container and assessed the loss at the sum of EUR 28,982. After having compensated SCL, its insurers sued CMA-CGM for compensation.

Held: Appeal dismissed.

The insurers complain that the Court of Appeal judgment ordered CMA-CGM to pay them only the equivalent in EUR of 823.96 SDRs at the rate in effect on the day of settlement, whereas:

under the terms of Article 4.5 of the original Brussels Convention of 25 August 1924 for the Unification of Certain Rules relating to Bills of Lading, the carrier and the vessel shall not be liable in any case for loss or damage caused to or relating to the goods for a sum exceeding 100 pounds sterling per package or unit, or the equivalent of this sum in other currency, unless the nature and value of these goods have been declared by the shipper before their shipment and this declaration has been included in the bill of lading; that, in order to limit the compensation owed by CMA-CGM to 823.96 SDRs, the Court of Appeal, after recalling that the first judge noted that the bill of lading referred, for the container concerned, to '1 Lot said to contain sweet corn' and considered that 'the parties to the contract of carriage had referred to a freight unit', which 'led to the application of a limitation of liability up to the equivalent in euros of 1 unit x 823.96 SDRs', and stated that 'the reference to a number of ears of corn not appearing in the bill of lading, this reference is not intended to serve in this case as a freight unit, except for the judges to seek, in the event of an insufficiency of the bill of lading, the unit chosen by the parties in the light of the other contractual documents'; that in ruling in this way, while noting that 'the mention in the bill of lading of the gross weight of the cargo in the heading "gross weight cargo" at 24,500 kg cannot prevail over the particulars made in the heading "Description of packages and goods as stated by shipper"', which resulted, on the contrary, that, in the absence of mention in the bill of lading of another freight unit, the parties could only have chosen the kg measure, the only one mentioned in the bill of lading, as the freight unit, the Court of Appeal, which did not draw the legal consequences from its own findings, violated the aforementioned provision.

Under art 4.5 of the original Hague Rules, the carrier, like the vessel, shall in no case be liable for loss or damage to or in respect of the goods for a sum exceeding 100 pounds sterling per package or unit, or the equivalent of that sum in other currency, unless the nature and value of the goods have been declared by the shipper before their shipment and that declaration has been inserted in the bill of lading.

It was within the exercise of its sovereign power to assess the particulars appearing in the bill of lading that the Court of Appeal held that the parties to the contract of carriage had, in this case, designated the container as a freight unit within the meaning of the aforementioned text. The appeal is therefore unfounded.