Latest news with #Maib
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Telegraph
Sailors looking at smartphones blamed for surge in ship collisions
An increase in collisions at sea has been blamed on seafarers spending hours scrolling on their mobile phones and falling asleep when they should be keeping watch. Captain Andrew Moll, Britain's chief inspector of marine accidents, said the increased automation of shipping had rendered watch-keeping mind-numbingly dull and led crews to view the shifts as time for rest and relaxation, rather than a vital element of safety. To make matters worse, a requirement to appoint additional lookouts to aid watch-keepers is often ignored, while some sailors are even deactivating alarms that sound on a regular basis to ensure they are paying attention to computer screens. Work by the Maritime Accident Investigation Branch (Maib), which scrutinises accidents involving British vessels worldwide and all incidents in UK territorial waters, said waning attention spans on the bridge have been linked with numerous recent disasters. Those include the collision between the container ship Solong and oil tanker Stena Immaculate off the mouth of the Humber on March 10. Capt Moll said the Solong, bound for Rotterdam from Grangemouth in Scotland, had been travelling in a straight line on autopilot for around 11 hours in poor visibility when it hit the tanker, killing one seaman and igniting a fire that took two days to extinguish. The Maib's interim report found that neither ship had a dedicated lookout and said further scrutiny will be given to their watch-keeping practices and 'fatigue management'. A collision between the British cargo vessel Scot Carrier and the barge Karin Høj, which killed two in 2024, happened after an officer on the former ship was distracted by the continual use of a tablet computer during his watch after earlier consuming alcohol, the Maib found. Capt Moll said: 'We're seeing more and more cases where a vessel has set off and a watch-keeper has turned up on the bridge, but they are not looking where the ship is going, and as a consequence it runs into something.' He said there was particular concern about the hundreds of coastal vessels plying crowded UK waters with only two watch-keepers on alternate six-hour shifts. Under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, each can work for 14 hours a day, five days a week. However, the Maib's research indicates that examples of crew falling asleep are just as prevalent on larger vessels with more officers to share watch-keeping duties. Capt Moll said that indicated a problem intrinsic to the changing nature of the role. 'Chronic boredom' He said: 'The job itself is not very exciting. If you went back 20 or 30 years, the watch-keeper had to rush around gathering information, and it was an active, busy thing. 'In the engine room they were looking at gauges and temperatures and on the bridge they were taking navigation fixes and plotting them on charts. 'That's now all being done by machines, which has taken away the engagement. Technically speaking, you're talking about chronic boredom and a job that suffers from qualitative and quantitative underload with the result that it lacks meaning and purpose.' In its annual report on marine safety the Maib said that 'humans do not make good monitors and if under-stimulated they will find other things to occupy themselves'. Capt Moll said that included listening to music, browsing the internet and making video calls. Other seafarers are essentially flipping their day, spending their breaks gaming and leaving them so exhausted that they fall asleep on the job when they return to the bridge. An early warning of the trend came in 2013 with a spectacular collision between the UK bulk carrier Seagate and the Timor Stream, a refrigerated-cargo ship, off the Dominican Republic. Both had been sailing through open water in good visibility yet crashed into each other, with the bow of the Timor Stream ploughing into the engine room and accommodation block of the Seagate, with sleeping crewmen miraculously escaping injury. The report said that neither watch-keeper had realised that the ships were on a collision course until less than a minute before the accident, blaming poor standards 'driven by complacency'. While vessels have multiple systems designed to maintain the attention of watch-keepers, those are often poorly understood or regarded as an irritation and deactivated, Capt Moll said. A Maib report on the collision between the freighter Scot Explorer and gas carrier Happy Falcon in the North Sea in 2023 found that the cargo ship's navigation aids were not being monitored, with its electric chart display system set to silent. Capt Moll said: 'You can have the equivalent of a dead-man's handle which if you don't set it every 15 minutes it will alert the whole ship, but that's being turned off. Navigational and radar alarms that tell you of an impending danger are being turned off or muted. 'So the watch-keepers aren't engaging with the systems and neither are they using the things that should force them to engage with the systems. That is a significant problem.' The ultimate solution, he said, may be to require manufacturers to modify warning systems and alarms so that they can never be disabled.
Finextra
27-06-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Moldovan bank maib signs with Tuub for Romanian ops
Tuum, the next-generation core banking platform, has announced today a strategic partnership with maib in Romania, where Moldova's largest bank looks at establishing its digital banking presence with asset-light retail-only offering. 0 Tuum's SaaS core banking platform will serve as the foundation for maib's greenfield operations in Romania. Maib selected Tuum in Romania after a comprehensive evaluation of leading core banking providers. Tuum stood out for its modularity, modern architecture, and rare ability to support agnostic deployment. This feature, enabling in-country deployment where necessary, was a key differentiator, future-proofing maib European data residency compliance as it scales. Jurgen de Ruijter, Head Representative of maib's operations in Romania, stated: 'Maib's decision to partner with Tuum came after a comprehensive evaluation of leading core banking platforms. Tuum was identified as the most modern, modular, and technologically advanced platform, setting it apart from other next-generation core banking solutions. We believe this solution supports us in our endeavour to build the next generation fintech.' Miljan Stamenkovic, Chief Revenue Officer at Tuum, commented: 'This is a milestone partnership for Tuum and a powerful validation of our platform's leadership in the European core banking market. Maib's expansion into Romania is one of the most ambitious digital banking initiatives in the region, and we're proud to support it with a solution engineered for speed, scalability, and compliance. Our agnostic deployment capability was a decisive factor—proving once again that flexibility is key in enabling banks to move fast and scale smart.' This deal highlights Tuum's leadership in enabling established financial institutions to execute 'launch and expand' strategies with modern, cloud-native technology. It reinforces Tuum's role as a strategic partner for ambitious digital banking ventures across Europe.
BBC News
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Matrix film producer files for bankruptcy
Village Roadshow Entertainment Group, the film production company behind franchises such as The Matrix, Ocean's and the Joker, has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, according to a filing with a Delaware firm has blamed its financial troubles on a legal battle with its former partner Warner Bros (WB) and a "failed and costly endeavour" into the production of independent films and television a bid to mitigate some of its financial problems, Village Roadshow is proposing to sell its extensive film library for $365m (£281m).The company's debts are estimated to be between $500m and $1bn, according to the court documents. Village RoadShow and WB produced and co-owned dozens of films over the years but their relationship soured in early 2022 after the release of the latest Matrix film - The Matrix Resurrections - on the streaming platform HBO Roadshow alleged WB had shut it out of its rights to any sequels and prequels of the films the two companies had previously worked on together."The WB arbitration has caused the company to incur more than $18m in legal fees, nearly all of which remain unpaid", chief restructuring officer Keith Maib said in a court legal battle, according to Mr Maib, has "irreparably decimated the working relationship" between the two companies, ultimately ending "the most lucrative nexus" for Village Roadshow's historic other issue faced by Village Roadshow was a costly studio business launched in 2018. None of the films or television series independently produced as part of that endeavour delivered any other film companies in the US, Village Roadshow also struggled with a slump in demand from the pandemic and the disruption from the strike action by Hollywood actors and writers, which started in May December, the Writers Guild of America banned its members from working with Village Roadshow over the company's alleged failure to pay its contributors.
Los Angeles Times
17-03-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
‘Joker,' ‘Matrix' producer files for bankruptcy protection amid Warner Bros. fight
Village Roadshow Entertainment has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a dark turn for the once-prolific film financing company that backed the 'Joker,' 'The Matrix' and 'Ocean's Eleven' movie franchises. The West Hollywood-based company blamed its ongoing legal battle with longtime partner Warner Bros. for its collapse, according to a Monday filing in U.S. bankruptcy court in Delaware. Village Roadshow also conceded that its ambitious push into producing independent films and television programs before the pandemic was unprofitable, exacerbating its financial woes. The breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. came after the studio introduced 'The Matrix Resurrections' in December 2021 on its HBO Max streaming service the same day the film was released in movie theaters. Village Roadshow complained that the Burbank studio's pivot away from an exclusive theatrical release had destroyed the value of a key franchise. Village Roadshow's predicament is a stark example of how the entertainment industry's shift to streaming has upended once vibrant businesses. Since its founding in 1997, Village Roadshow has co-produced and co-financed more than 100 movies that together generated more than $19 billion in worldwide box office receipts, according to court documents. 'A confluence of macro-economic factors have weighed heavily on the company's balance sheet,' Keith Maib, an executive with Accordion Partners who is serving as chief restructuring officer for the Village Roadshow liquidation, wrote in a declaration. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes and major entertainment companies' embrace of streaming helped crater the company, Maib wrote. The bankruptcy filing was designed to facilitate 'orderly sales of the debtor's assets,' he said. Village Roadshow is controlled by Vine Media Opportunities, Falcon Strategic Partners and a Canadian limited partnership, 1397225 Ontario Ltd. The company said its assets are worth an estimated $100 million to $500 million. But it has more than 200 creditors and debts of $500 million to $1 billion, according to the filing. Village Roadshow owes more than $11 million to Kirkland & Ellis in Los Angeles for professional services. Its debt to the Writers Guild of America West tops $1.4 million. (The WGA put Village Roadshow on its strike list in December for nonpayment.) The filing also shows that Village Roadshow owes Bryan Cranston's Moonshot Entertainment Inc. $794,000 for development costs and another $250,000 to Sony Pictures Television. Former Sony executive Steve Mosko, who joined Village Roadshow in 2018 as chief executive, left earlier this year. He had attempted to build Village Roadshow into an independent studio that produced its own movies and television shows. But the Mosko-led campaign to remake the company into a full-service studio proved costly and untimely. Village Roadshow put into development 99 feature films, 166 scripted television series and 67 unscripted series. Of those, six movies and seven television series went into production. 'No film or television series that was produced was able to create a profit that could sustain the studio business,' Maib wrote. Village Roadshow's legal battle with Warner Bros. was the last straw. The company's dispute against Warner Bros. remains unresolved in arbitration — more then three years after the lawsuit was filed. In late 2021, Warner Bros. was recalibrating due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, then owned by AT&T, was prioritizing gaining subscribers to support its streaming service over its traditional business of releasing movies to cinemas. That's when it placed 'The Matrix Resurrections' on HBO Max. Village Roadshow said it has spent more than $18 million in legal fees to try to resolve the Warner Bros. dispute — fees that remain unpaid. While the firm also worked on movies with Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, its most valuable assets were produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., including 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'The Lego Movie.' The company co-produced and co-financed 91 films with Warner Bros. by arranging some $4.5 billion in financing. Village Roadshow's library assets generate about $50 million a year in revenue, according to Maib's declaration. Last year, Village Roadshow engaged Goldman Sachs Group to sell some library assets, but uncertainty caused by the lingering Warner Bros. dispute scuttled the effort. The company then engaged Sheppard Mullin Richter and Solic Capital Advisors, which came up with a 'stalking horse bidder' to buy the assets following the Chapter 11 process, Maib wrote. A year ago, the company had about 45 employees in the U.S. and Melbourne, Australia. In its move to slash costs, the firm now has fewer than a dozen employees. As of this month, the company's monthly overhead is about $300,000.
