CAIRO, May 25 (Xinhua) -- Egypt offered to cut its compensation claim down to 550 million U.S. dollars against the impounded Ever Given vessel that blocked the Suez Canal in March, the canal authority chief Osama Rabie said on Tuesday.
"We reduced the value of the required compensation by 40 percent from 916 million U.S. dollars to 550 million U.S. dollars after we obtained the estimated financial value of the goods on the ship," Rabie said in a statement.
In April, an Egyptian court ordered the owners of Ever Given to pay 916 million U.S. dollars in compensation.
"The court's decision was taken based on estimating the initial value of the goods on board at 2 billion U.S. dollars," he explained, adding that the shipowners claimed that they did not possess a statement about the financial value of the goods.
"After the owners of the ship estimated the costs of the cargo loaded to be around 775 million U.S. dollars, we respected this and reduced the compensation claim to 550 million U.S. dollars," he said.
Egyptian authorities seized Ever Given in April. The 400-meter-long, 200,000-ton giant container vessel ran aground across the canal on March 23 and halted the traffic for six days.
Linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal lost between 12 to 15 million U.S. dollars in daily revenues during the blockage, according to statistics of the canal authority.
