Fraudsters sell fake flags of Caribbean islands to dozens of oil tankers.

Follow the Money [FTM], the investigative news outlet for radically independent journalism, has reported:-

A Beverly Hills company is helping dozens of sanctioned Russian and Iranian oil and gas tankers evade scrutiny by selling them fake flags, a Follow the Money investigation shows.

Vessels must be registered with and carry the flag of a country to be able to dock at a port legally. A ship sailing without a flag – or with a false flag – is effectively stateless, uninsured and operates outside international regulations.

Some companies, however, offer counterfeit certificates and flags, often at a steep price.

One such firm is the Maritime Safety & Technical Administration (MSTA), a company registered in California but with no publicly available information on its ownership.

• “These ships are operating completely outside international maritime government norms and rules and regulations”.

The firm is selling vessel registration documentation and flags of the island of Sint Maarten, a small island state – an independent country but part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – some 800 kilometres north of Venezuela.

The only catch?

Sint Maarten doesn’t have a ship registry. With that, all vessel registrations to that country are fake.

In total, MSTA has sold at least 77 fake Sint Maarten flags for use on oil and gas tankers, a Follow the Money investigation reveals.

After extracting all names and registration numbers of vessels that received fake certificates from the company, FTM found that the U.S., European Union, or the U.K have sanctioned 30.

• “It has gotten really bad now,” said Paul Ellinger, a ship inspector at Sint Maarten's Shipping and Maritime Inspectorate.
• “First they started off with just [certain certificates] but now they are actually registering ships: oil tankers, bulk carriers and all kinds of things.”

Western allies impose sanctions on vessels to hit Russia’s and Iran’s oil exports and diminish the revenue the two countries get from them.

But MSTA isn’t the only one:

• Hundreds of other ships around the world are crossing the seas with fraudulent flags.
• The International Maritime Organisation – the United Nations’ agency responsible for maritime safety – currently identifies 222 such tankers.
• That’s an almost sevenfold increase within just two years.
• Of those, the U.S., the EU and the U.K. have sanctioned 79 – most of them in the U.S. because of their ties to Iran.

Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior maritime intelligence analyst at maritime AI company Windward, said:

• “These ships are operating completely outside international maritime government norms and rules and regulations,”
• “It’s … an unprecedented problem for the International Maritime Organisation and for international shipping, because you have a completely parallel fleet undermining the global integrity of world trade.”

Read more here:-

https://www.ftm.eu/articles/sanctioned-tankers-buy-fake-flags-sint-maarten?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebuttonnietleden&utm_source=linkbutton

https://www.ftm.eu/articles/sanctioned-tankers-buy-fake-flags-sint-maarten?utm_source=nieuwsbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CaribbeanTankers&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Shipping%20around%20sanctions%3F%20Fraudsters%20sell%20fake%20flag%20of%20Caribbean%20island%20to%20dozens%20of%20oil%20tankers&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20Jesse%20%26%20Dimitri%2021-07