Paul Gallie

Captain Paul Gallie, general manager of Terminales Internacionales

de Ecuador (TIDE), talks to Rainbow Nelson

What is it that brought an old Welsh seadog to drop anchor in South America?

I started as a cadet working on tramping ships with Rearden Smith, the Welsh tramping company leaving from Cardiff. It had a management contract for TMM [then the Mexican national shipping line]. At that time, there weren’t enough certified officers and so they had British officers on all the Mexican ships.

It was a wonderful time from a seafarer’s perspective. We would wait for a week to take on bunkers – which were free because we were all part of the government, which also owned the oil company – but it could take weeks to get things done. While we were waiting we would go ashore with a crate of beer and enjoy ourselves.

What was it that drew you so much to Latin America and Colombia in particular?

I worked as a captain on Chiquita’s great white fleet between 1987 and 2001, when I spent most of my time travelling between Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Antwerp. I was heavily involved in its newbuilding programme, building 16 ships, and for three or four years I took out the Chiquita Scandinavia. By that time I had fallen in love with Latin America and lived in Santa Marta, Colombia, between 1989 and 1997. What led you to make the switch from sea to land? Working with Chiquita, I was still sailing, but by around 1995 the company said it wanted a cargo superintendent in Turbo when the banana industry was becoming more palletised.

Turbo and Santa Marta – the two principal ports for Colombian drug shipments on the Caribbean coast. That must have been interesting?

It was. When we sailed from there, we used to assume that there were drugs on board. I remember once there was a case when the ship had sailed from Santa Marta to Antwerp. Even before it had landed, there were reports in the local newspaper in Santa Marta that they had caught a big drug shipment in one of the holds.

That scared the captain, and he asked to be transferred to the other ship [for the return journey] sailing to Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. He thought somebody was setting him up. Owing to a problem with one of the ships, without realising he was the captain, I had to switch that ship to Santa Marta. He thought we were trying to kill him, but he was all right about it in the end. The guys who worked in Santa Marta or Turbo would often fly in from somewhere else, and vice versa, to make sure that they did not become targets. How did you end up working for Hutchison Port Holdings?

While I was in South America I became known as Pablo [Spanish for Paul]. I always said that if I started a company I would call it Pablo Shipping. When I moved back to Antwerp I started to get some work as a consultant to shipping lines going to and from West Africa.

I remember we did an appraisal of all their port calls on one trip. In some places we realised that the loading methods were not great, in others there was a lack of storage space/equipment, but in Gambia it was clear that the agent was just lazy. I went back to them and said you need to improve loading practices here and there, and you need a new agent in Gambia. I will do it as long as you help set me up. The company was called Pablo Shipping Agency and I worked there for more than a year. One day I got a call from a headhunter who asked me whether I was Pablo and what I knew about shipping in Colombia. I was intrigued and wanted to know what it was about. They said: "Don’t worry, it will be worth your while; just get on a plane and get back to England as soon as you can."

On the Heathrow Express into London I called the headhunter and they said "don’t bother coming to the office; get yourself straight on a train to Felixstowe," and at that moment I realised that it was Hutchison. The next thing I knew, I was being offered the job of business development manager in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

That is a pretty group of countries struggling to get along at the moment (the three were involved in an intense international dispute in March). Have you got any advice on how ports can contribute to world peace?

Well that is a good question, and you can see clearly in Manta how ports, and in particular trade, help create more integration. The Manta-Manaus corridor has brought the Brazilian and Ecuadorean governments together. These kinds of meetings have a very positive impact politically. A project such as the Manta-Manaus corridor, that will develop traffic of cargoes from the Brazilian Amazon to Manta, can only help to strengthen regional ties.