The Connecticut Maritime Association (CMA), now approaching the fortieth anniversary of its founding, has announced that Todd Clough, the President & CEO of tanker owner Fairfield Chemical Carriers LLC has been selected as the recipient of the prestigious Commodore award, for 2025.
The award will be presented at the Gala Dinner of the annual CMA’s annual event- which is really an amalgam of conference and exhibition, to be held in Stamford, Connecticut in early April, 2025. The award is designed to honour industry leaders “…who have made significant contributions to the growth and development of the international maritime industry.”
The CMA has evolved greatly from its origin in the mid 1980’s, essentially starting with a group of local shipbrokers gathering for lunch at local dining haunts. The gathering drew from a shipping cluster that had built itself around a movement of brokers, and owners, outward from New York City beginning in the late 1970s, to towns like Greenwich and Stamford, in commuting distance from the urban hub about an hour away.
In the late 1980’s, as computers and fax machines were seeing rapid penetration into shipping offices and telex machines were on the way out, the CMA hosted its first show for vendors, held in a local civic center. The CMA conference came a few years later in 1990, along with the first Commodore award to the late Ole Skaarup, a pioneer in the bulk carrier trades. That first conference event was held in what is now the Hilton Hotel, in Stamford.
2025 Commodore Clough has spent three decades working to build up Fairfield Chemical Carriers, which was acquired in 2024 by MOL Chemical Tankers, and joins an illustrious group.
Through the years, award recipients have been shipowners based locally—Ole Skaarup’s office was in nearby Greenwich, as was that of Oivind Lorentzen III—some came from Asia—Helmut Sohmen and Sabrina Chao come to mind—and others were based in Europe—Philippe Louis-Dreyfus, Torben Jensen, and John Fredriksen, for example.
Plenty more locally-based shipping players have been represented through the years—think Peter Georgiopoulos, Morten Arntzen, Lois Zabrocky, Gary Vogel and, most recently, the 2024 award recipient Poten & Partners’ Mike Tusiani.
The Fairfield Chemical Carriers story is an impressive one. Starting as Fairfield Maxwell in the mid 1950’s, the company had deep ties to trades between the United States and Asia. Morphing into Fairfield Chemical Carriers in the 1990s, when Clough came aboard, the company has grown exponentially and now operates more than three dozen owned and chartered-in vessels.
