russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ continues to use forged documents

Guild Hall reports on this.

According to a report by the Insikt Group (a division of Recorded Future), fraudulent websites regularly pose as the national maritime administrations of Benin, Cameroon, Chad, the Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Malawi, The Gambia, Namibia and Zambia, and offer self-service tools for generating certificates and registering vessels under foreign flags.

According to adf-magazine, russia’s so-called ‘shadow fleet’ comprises up to 591 vessels, transporting up to 4.1 million barrels of oil per day and generating up to $100 billion in revenue per year.

Similarly, Iran deploys around 170 obsolete tankers without proper insurance to export 1.6 million barrels per day.

The scale of the problem is confirmed by findings from Lloyd’s List, where resources linked to the marinegov.net website were used to create fake entities — for example, in Malawi, 40 tankers managed to register under the country’s false flag within a month before the IMO issued a warning and the website was shut down.

Experts are therefore calling on governments to monitor registers continuously and to share information across jurisdictions.

russia has launched a large-scale and systematic scheme to use African shipping registers to shield its ‘shadow fleet’ from Western sanctions, the Robert Lansing Institute previously stated.

Source: Ekonomichna Pravda