CC Liu, the founder and chairman of Parakou Shipping and honorary consul for Norway in Hong Kong, passed away over the weekend.
“CC was a great supporter of the Association and Hong Kong Maritime,” the Hong Kong Shipowners Association said in a note to its members today.
Traditionally a low profile owner, CC Liu founded Parakou in the mid-1980s when he bought out a bankrupt entity. Liu went on to build a sizeable dry bulk and tanker fleet that hit financially tricky times in recent years.
Liu was one of those characters who can genuinely lay claim to having shipping in the blood. He was born on a small boat on the Yangtze, attended a maritime college in Nanjing before starting out as a seaman with the then just founded Cosco Group back in 1964. Another employee at Cosco, Chik Sau Kam, would go on to become Liu’s wife. The pair immigrated to Hong Kong in 1971 where Liu started to work for Ocean Tramping before scraping enough together to take the plunge with Parakou, which developed from small, humble beginnings into a major player thanks in no small part to Liu’s ability to leverage off his mainland contacts, not least at Sinotrans.
He continued to work at Parakou right up until his death alongside his two sons.
