MH17 families seeking higher payouts face tricky choices, says report
Families of victims on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 which crashed in a restive Ukrainian region will have a hard time getting a higher payout from the airline, Bloomberg reported today.
The business portal said MAS was already struggling financially before the first tragedy hit it on March 8, when flight MH370 disappeared in the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.
Families of the MH370 victims were entitled to US$173,000 (RM553,000) compensation as outlined in the Montreal Convention, which limits claims against an airline unless negligence can be proven.
Some MH370 families are suing MAS in the United States where the courts are often more generous in handing out awards.
In the case of MH17, though, which was allegedly shot down by a surface-to-air missile on July 17, there are problems establishing who was responsible for firing the missile.
There were 298 people on board flight MH17, of whom 193 were Dutch and 43 Malaysians, including the 15 crew members.
International investigators tried to reach the MH17 crash site near Donetsk for nearly a week before finally gaining access yesterday. Heavy fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels had made it difficult to reach the area.
Both Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for shooting down the Boeing 777-200.
On July 21, MAS said it was offering the next-of-kin US$5,000 assistance.
Families now seeking a higher payout were limited to suing the airline, potentially for negligence, in the Netherlands, where the flight originated, or Malaysia, the final destination, said Bloomberg.
Those are “two crummy choices” for jurisdictions, Gerald Sterns, an air crash liability lawyer in Oakland, California, was quoted as saying.
He said the Dutch courts limited liability, offsetting it against life insurance, and there was little faith in Malaysian courts.
The other option is to sue based on the claim that MAS allowed its pilots to fly over a combat zone, Bloomberg quoted a Chicago-based air crash liability lawyer as saying.
But Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai had earlier said the flight path taken by MH17 was safe.
"Both the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have clarified that MH17 was not operating in restricted airspace," he said a day after the plane was shot down.
“My understanding is that they were flying a recognised route” used by other aircraft that same day, Dennis O’Hara, a plane crash liability defence lawyer, was quoted as saying. “To suggest they should anticipate a thing like this, that’s just not reasonable.”
The final option for additional compensation, Bloomberg suggested, was to blame Russia and seek payment from Moscow in international courts.
There has been precedence with the downing of PanAm over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Sixteen years later, Libya agreed to pay US$10 million for each of the 270 people who died.
But the Dutch government said suing Russia was too complicated.
Last week, British lawyers from McCue & Partners, a London firm, said they was preparing a class action suit against Russian President Vladimir Putin in relation to the shooting down of flight MH17.
The firm said in a statement it was working with partners in the US and Ukraine on “potential legal actions that can be brought against those responsible directly and/or indirectly” for the destruction of flight MH17. – August 1, 2014.
