The Federal Maritime Commission has hit MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company with $22.67 million in civil penalties after a multi-year enforcement case found the world’s largest container carrier engaged in widespread billing violations affecting customs brokers and cargo owners.

The action ranks among the largest civil penalty assessments in recent FMC history and underscores the agency’s increasingly aggressive posture toward carrier compliance with the Shipping Act.

Following an investigation by the FMC’s Bureau of Enforcement, Investigations, and Compliance, the Commission upheld — and in key areas expanded — an earlier ruling by an Administrative Law Judge, concluding that MSC improperly billed parties with no control over cargo, failed to publish required tariff terms, and systematically overcharged customers between 2018 and 2023.

One violation centered on MSC’s practice of billing customs brokers listed only as “notify parties” for demurrage and detention charges through a merchant clause in its bills of lading. The Commission found the practice violated federal law because those parties had no role in moving the cargo, resulting in $65,000 in penalties for conduct occurring between 2018 and 2020.

A much larger penalty — $9.46 million — stemmed from MSC’s failure to properly publish tariff terms governing charges on non-operating refrigerated containers (NORs) from 2021 through early 2023. While the Commission narrowed the period it deemed “knowing and willful” to begin in March 2022, when MSC told regulators it would correct its tariff, the agency still found substantial violations of the Shipping Act.

The largest single penalty, $13.145 million, followed the Commission’s reversal of the ALJ’s finding that MSC’s NOR overcharges were merely the result of a billing system error. Instead, the Commission concluded the pattern — affecting roughly 23% of all NOR invoices in 2021 — amounted to an unreasonable practice under the law, imposing $5,000 per violation.

The January 6, 2026 ruling represents a sharp escalation from an earlier Administrative Law Judge decision that had limited total fines to roughly $4 million. The Commission’s final order dramatically expanded MSC’s liability across three categories of violations, sending what regulators characterize as a clear signal about heightened scrutiny of demurrage and detention billing practices.

“The Commission concluded that MSC’s billing was not merely the result of a mistake but rather that it constituted an unreasonable practice,” according to the decision. That determination proved critical in the Commission’s reversal of the ALJ’s more lenient findings on container overcharges.

All civil penalties collected by the FMC are paid into the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund, not retained by the agency.

The ruling marks another major enforcement action as the FMC continues to tighten oversight of carrier billing and contracting practices following widespread complaints during the pandemic-era supply chain crunch.