The Daily View: Loose lips sink ships
NEWS is what someone, somewhere, doesn’t want reported: all the rest is advertisement, William Randolph Hearst used to tell his reporters.
Getting that exclusive information, however, has become notably more difficult when it comes to matters of geopolitical security.
Usually, leaky political structures have been tightened and information is being controlled on a need-to-know basis, particularly across nervous Nato governments.
That is understandable when you consider the potential consequences.
While we don’t yet know how far the French authorities are prepared to go in their apparent detention of the infamous tanker Boracay, there are serious concerns regarding the potential for Russian escalation.
The last time an EU state pulled over a flagless shadow fleet tanker, Moscow scrambled an Su-35 fighter jet which then hung around in Estonian airspace until a tense stand-off ended with the cowed Estonians escorting the tanker out of its maritime zone without using force.
Boracay, aka Pushpa, Kiwala and a host of other identities, is not Russian. It’s not even flagged to the fictional register of Benin, whose flag it purports to fly. But it is carrying Russian crude and that fact is unlikely to have gone unnoticed in Moscow, regardless of how much you ignore journalists requests for clarification.
The quiet policy that sees EU states diligently monitoring flagless vessels that they have already sanctioned pass through their exclusive economic zones unchallenged, was always going to have a limited shelf life.
The process of maritime regulatory oversight and flag state certification is not well understood outside of shipping, but incidents such as Boracay are pulling it reluctantly out of the shadows and into mainstream news media.
While we may be starting to sound like a broken record for Lloyd’s List subscribers who have been forcibly educated in murky world of shadow fleet risk, the general public will understandably be asking questions when the inevitable casualty occurs.
What happens next with Boracay promises to set an important precedent.
Richard Meade,
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List
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