Mozambique joins rapidly growing fake flag roster for sanctioned tonnage
MOZAMBIQUE has become the latest fraudulent ship register of choice for sanctioned tankers as flag hopping between fake flags continues to accelerate and grow in volume.
At least six sanctioned tankers have signalled a flag change to Mozambique over the past few weeks, with five of them moving from other fraudulent flag operations.
At least three International Maritime Organization identity numbers for ships that have previously been scrapped have also appeared with a Mozambique register signal over the same period.
While the Mozambique flag is used by five government-owned patrol vessels and several tugs and fishing vessels, the government does not operate a commercial ship registry.
A website purporting to be the Mozambique Maritime Authority is thought to be part of the Marinegov.net group of fraudulent websites uncovered by Lloyd’s List in July.
Over 30 fake flag registers and crew certification scam websites are all linked back to the same Marinegov.net domain, indicating that they are part of connected operation.
The Mozambique website is directly linked to another fraudulent website operating under the name of the non-existent Maritime Directorate of the Czech Republic, which in turn is hosted by the Marinegov.net nexus of websites.
Until late last week the fake website details were still being listed as the official contact point for the Mozambique government in the IMO’s database.
While those details have now been removed after the IMO secretariat contacted the Mozambique government, several other fraudulent government details remain live in the database with new frauds being regularly added.
The IMO database is updated weekly via a feed from the commercial operator of the IMO’s numbering system, S&P Global, however individual member states are responsible for inputting the correct contact details.
In the past week a fraudulent Tanzanian operation has been removed, but a new fake operation for the Maldives has been added.
Fraudulent details for Togo, Hungary and Tunisia remain unchanged in the database.
The IMO’s database now contains 432 fraudulently registered ships, but this number is thought to only represent a fraction of the growing number of ships using fake flags for increasingly brief periods of time.
The velocity of changes between flags, signalled by a change in the first three digits of a ship’s unique identifying Maritime Mobile Service Identity number, means that the true number of fake flagged ships is not accurately represented in databases.
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