Ships Are Flying False Flags to Dodge Sanctions

Ships Are Flying False Flags to Dodge Sanctions
Elisabeth Braw January 30, 2023

Illegal Russian tankers are a maritime nightmare.

The world’s top three ship-owning countries are China, Greece, and Japan. But the top three countries under which ships sail include none of these—nor fourth-ranked United States or fifth-ranked Germany. The flag league is instead led by Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands. They are flag-of-convenience states, economically weak countries that allow vessels to register in their ship registry for a much lower fee than developed countries. The lower fee comes with less service—and less scrutiny—than traditional maritime states offer. Although the former has made flag-of-convenience states popular with countless vessels over the past decades, the latter is now making them extremely attractive to vessels seeking to get around Western sanctions against Russia. Such vessels have begun switching to flag-of-convenience states—or even taken to sailing under their flag without telling them.

And these overburdened maritime nations do little to remove the squatters. Rickety tankers that should be headed for the junkyard are instead roaming the world’s oceans, bringing oil from Russia and its fellow sanctioned nations, Venezuela and Iran, to China and other customers. And it’ll take a major crisis to force the problem to the surface.

“Shipping companies that are trying to get around sanctions are targeting really small registries that are privately managed,” Lloyd’s List Intelligence maritime analyst Michelle Wiese Bockmann told Foreign Policy. “Then they either falsely claim that their ships are flagged there because the country will do nothing about it, or they legitimately flag the vessels there and get the country to issue false company IMO numbers,” referring to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Every shipping company has an identification number with the IMO. But if a shipping company or vessel doesn’t want to be recognized, then they can trick a flag state’s registry into using fake IMO numbers—and since flag-of-convenience states’ shipping registries are often poorly resourced, privately managed, or both, officials rarely spend serious time investigating IMO numbers. And shipping companies operating under a false IMO number can be traced only with extreme difficulty.

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