Simon Bennett


General Manager, Sustainable Development, Swire Shipping

36 years ago, Simon Bennett joined Swire Pacific Offshore (SPO) which provides marine support services to the global offshore oil and gas exploration and production industry. Following several voyages as Master, he came ashore in 1991, working as HSE and Country Manager in Brunei, HSE Manager with Swire Production Testers working with their rig-based Early Production Systems for Maersk in Qatar and Shell in Iran, Marketing Manager in Dubai, before he moved to his last but one job as General Director managing the contracts and operations of SPO’s three new icebreaking Platform Supply Vessels in the Russian Far East.

Since returning to the warmth of Singapore again twelve years ago, he now wears the hat of the GM for Sustainable Development for both SPO, and since late 2010 also for The China Navigation Company, the Swire group’s privately owned deep-sea container and bulk shipping company. Both SPO and Swire Shipping have their Operational Headquarters in Singapore, and have responsibly recycled 12 ships in the past 5 years in China and India. Simon is on the Board of Trustees of the Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI, for which Swire Shipping (formerly The China Navigation Company) was both the founding member in Asia, and a founding member of the steering group of the Ship Recycling Transparency Initiative (SRTI).