The insured, Pech Fruits SL, contracted the services of the defendant carrier, Mosca Maritimo SL, for the transport of a consignment of 21 pallets of fresh broccoli, totalling 1,260 boxes (60 boxes per pallet). The defendant dealt with the road transport of the merchandise from its origin, Campo de Lorca, to Barcelona, and from there by sea to Salalah, Oman, where it was transferred to another ship to the final destination port of Hamad, Qatar. Upon arrival at its destination, the loss of the cargo was recorded: a bad smell, dry and yellow flowers, blackened stumps, etc. During the maritime transport, the temperature at which the cargo was kept was inadequate: although the bill of lading stated that it must be 1º C, the average temperature was registered as 2.5º C, then rose to a maximum of 8.5º C, and dropped to an average of 3º C until the day of delivery.

The plaintiff insurer claimed EUR 17,241.44, having paid out its insured.

Held: The plaintiff's claim is upheld in the amount of EUR 14,655.22.

Article 277 of Law 14/2014 on Maritime Navigation (the LNM) provides:

1. The carrier is responsible for any damage or loss of the cargo, as well as delay in its delivery, caused while it was in its custody, in accordance with the provisions set forth in this section, which will be applied mandatorily to all maritime transport contracts.

Contractual clauses that directly or indirectly seek to mitigate or annul that responsibility to the detriment of the holder of the right to receive the goods shall have no effect. However, such clauses, when they are agreed in a charterparty and do not imply exoneration due to intent or gross negligence of the carrier, will have effect exclusively in the relations between the latter and the charterer, without being able to be raised in opposition, in any case, against a recipient who is a party other than the charterer.

2. Contracts for the maritime transport of goods, national or international, under the bill of lading regime and the responsibility of the carrier, shall be governed by the International Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Regarding Bills of Lading, signed in Brussels on August 25th of 1924, the Protocols that modify it to which Spain is a State party, and this law.

For its part, art 278 of the LNM, when referring to the contractual carrier and the actual carrier, provides that 'the liability established in this section extends jointly and severally to both the person who agrees to carry out the transport and the person who actually does it with their own means'.

This case involves international multimodal transport, which involves moving goods from one country to another, using two or more modes of transport; in this case, land and sea legs are combined. In addition, a single cargo unit has been used with the merchandise inside, a container, from origin to final destination, passing from one mode of transport to another, but without any kind of rupture.

The multimodal transport contract between a shipper and an operator is embodied in a single multimodal transport document (here, a FIATA bill of lading) that is generally issued by a freight forwarder and covers the entire logistics chain and the different modes of transport used. For this reason, it will be the multimodal transport operator who issues the unified document of all the means and modes of transport used, assuming the responsibilities of the execution of the contract.

Article 68.1 of the Law 15/2019, of November 11, regulates multimodal transport in the following terms:

A multimodal contract of carriage will be governed by the regulations of each mode, as if the carrier and the shipper had entered into a different transport contract for each phase of the journey. Protests for losses, breakdowns or delays will be governed by the rules applicable to the mode of transport in which the delivery is made or must be made. When the phase of the journey in which the damage occurred cannot be determined, the responsibility of the carrier will be decided in accordance with the provisions of this law.

In this case, the plaintiff alleges that the loss of the cargo occurred during transport by sea.

From the tests carried out, it is proven that the loss of the cargo, the pallets with boxes of broccoli, occurred during maritime transport as the merchandise was kept at an inadequate temperature. It is not possible to accept the defendant's allegations that there were several contributing causes to the accident: poor stowage or packaging or poor humidity or ventilation conditions. These are mere assumptions without any supporting or probative element in this regard, unlike the cause of the temperature, which is clearly accredited.

Consequently, pursuant to art 277 of the LNM and related provisions, the responsibility for the loss of the cargo lies with the defendant, once it has been established that during maritime transport the temperature of the cargo was inadequate.