New French Incentive for Investment in French Ships

Ferdinand Vroom, Constant & Constant, Paris

Introduction
For some considerable time now, French governments of varying political tendencies have been lobbied by French shipping interests (owner/operators, unions, bankers) to create conditions for attracting private investment and personal savings to the shipping sector. The existing panoply of incentives has not proven to be an outright success and, in enacting recently a new fiscal incentive for private sector investment in shipowning, the French government is hoping to satisfy, to some degree, the pressures of the various interested sectors by setting out three objectives:

1. to stem the continuing decline in the size of the French merchant fleet, which has dropped from being the eighth largest in the world at the time of the 1973/74 oil crisis, with some 500 ships to twenty-third today, with only 210 ships;

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