Ghost ships on the oceans. 285 tankers are flying false flags. A dark report has been revealed

About 285 tankers serving international maritime transport still fly false flags, despite increasingly harsh crackdowns on the practice by the United States, Britain and European Union countries, according to the latest report by Windward, an Israeli maritime market analysis company.

Windward identified 18 such false – as defined by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) – registers. The flags most frequently used in this practice are those belonging to West Africa Guinea (51 ships), Netherlands Antilles (45), Guyana (44) i Aruba (24).

Floating ecological bombs

The ships detected by Windward were either using completely false registers or were using existing legal flags, but without the knowledge of their owners. At least that's how IMO explained it to the companies operating the registries, which are usually private enterprises with loose ties to the governments of the countries they represent.

This practice mainly targets tankers smuggling Russian and Iranian crude oil and weapons. According to the Israeli company, almost 40 percent — or more than 200 ships — of the 540 Iranian tankers and gas carriers it analyzed engaged in these illegal and dangerous practices. Additionally, it turned out that over 300 of these 540 ships were already subject to sanctions from the United States, Great Britain or the European Union, which proves the determination of shipowners operating in the gray zone.

Most of these units are old, often not fully operational tankers, on average 22 years old, operating without valid insurance. They sometimes break down on the busiest sea routes, which is what happened to the sanctioned Progress tanker, which, as a stateless ship, recently adopted the flag of the Russian Federation and has been drifting in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Algeria for four days, loaded with 730,000 barrels of crude oil.

“False flags undermine the commercial and legal infrastructure on which global shipping depends for the predictable operation,” Windward concluded in its report. (PAP)

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