AMAL Arab-Magyar Associated Lines Co. (mgr. MAHART, Budapest), 1975-1986

During the economic boom in mid 1970s the MAHART in order to get bigger share from transports to the Middle-East founded a joint venture with EURABIA under the name AMAL (Arabic-Hungarian) Shipping Co. The new company brought two ships under Hungarian flag from Sweden at the end of 1975 and beginning of 1976 and named them AMAL EXPRESS & AMAL GLORY. Their service was not long lived, both were sold for scrap soon, the GLORY at Bilbao in the spring of 1980, the EXPRESS at Karachi in the spring of 1982. After this the company functioned without ships for a few years. This time around the mother company MAHART started writing off its old vessels thus all which passed 20 were to be written off. First in row were the three remaining Danube-sea going ships, which in 1984/85 sailed up to Budapest once more for the last time. In February 1984 the ÚJPEST was sold to AMAL which used it under the name ARRABONA with Hungarian crew. Her homeport was not known since letters were carved out of her stamp. According to her crew she ran under Hungarian flag until May, 1985. Then she was purchased by Greek owners and she got scrapped up. The ownership of AMAL became 52,2% Arabic by this time. One of them, Affaki Jusuf was the man who as a co-owner of Mena Shipping Co. had bought earlier two MAHART motorvessels the DUNA and the BALATON in 1968. MAHART wanted to transfer some of its ships into a newly established joint venture CENAM and operate them under Hungarian flag. To accomplish this MAHART had to acquisite its shares from AMAL, then AMAL fusioned in CENAM this way.

József Horváth: What happens to you, Hungarian sea navigation? Aqua Magazin, 2001. vol. 25.