Patrick Donner

Professor, Associate Academic Dean at World Maritime University

Trainer

Patrick Donner received an LLM from the University of Turku. He qualified for the bar in Finland (vicehäradshövding) in 1977 and served on the bench as deputy judge and acting chief judge of the City Court of Mariehamn for several years in the late 1970s. Professor Donner served the Sally Shipping Group for 12 years, advancing from chief legal counsel and company secretary to deputy managing director with responsibility for the legal affairs of the Group, which operated tankers and had ferry operations in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and cruise operations in the Caribbean. After the Sally Group he was managing director of Delfin Cruises Ltd in Finland, operating cruises in the Baltic, after which he ran his own law and management consultancy firm for a few years. During all this time, he taught maritime law (part-time) at the Maritime Academy of Åland and also held numerous non-executive positions on boards of directors of shipping and insurance companies as well as elected public office at local level.

Since January 1995, Professor Donner has been at the World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden, currently as Associate Academic Dean, teaching international post-graduate students in all commercial aspects of shipping with an emphasis on maritime and commercial law as well as Programme Director for a distance learning course for a Postgraduate Diploma in marine insurance, offered by World Maritime University in co-operation with Lloyd’s Maritime Academy. He is the author of Insurance Perspective on Places of Refuge (in Chircop, A., and Linden, O., Places of Refuge for Ships, Leiden, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2005).