Timor-Leste joins rapidly growing market of fake registries taking in sanctioned tonnage
TIMOR-LESTE has become the target location of the latest fake flag operation registering sanctioned ships via an entirely fraudulent shipping registry.
Lloyd’s List has tracked at least eight ships that have started using the fake Timor-Leste flag since April.
Five of the ships are directly sanctioned as a result of their involvement in shadow fleet operations.
Representatives from Timor-Leste’s National Directorate of Maritime Transport have confirmed that none of the ships have been registered by the government, which is now examining how the “illegal” ships could be stopped.
According to Alberto Pereira, from the Timor-Leste National Directorate of Maritime Transport, the government is liaising with at least one other government and “relevant parties” in a bid to shut down the register and stop the ships from signalling a Timor-Leste identification.
Ships registered to fraudulent flags signal their fake credentials via a unique nine-digit number assigned to a vessel or shore station known as a Maritime Mobile Service Identity number.
“Timor-Leste has not issued any MMSI numbers or registered ships from other countries,” Pereira said.
“Any ships using the flag and MMSI number are illegal and it is hoped that they can be detained and processed according to international law,” he continued.
The Timor-Leste government was first alerted to the fraud when Lloyd’s List first reported sanctioned tankers were reflagging to Timor-Leste in April.
Since then the Chinese Maritime Safety Agency has also raised concerns directly with the Timor-Leste administration after a tanker Olina (IMO: 9282479) switched from Sao Tome and Principe to Timor-Leste on 16 June, prior to a dark port call to Dongying, which was completed earlier this week.
Olina is typical of the recent influx of tonnage to the new fake flag. The 20-year-old crude oil tanker was de-registered by Panama in February this year after the US Treasury sanctioned its beneficial owner, a Hong Kong-registered company called Sunne, on the basis of its involvement in Russian oil exports.
Sunne controlled 10 tankers targeted by Ofac in January and two of them, Syndra (IMO: 9321976) and Olina have subsequently started signalling Timor-Leste as their registered flag.
Syndra was similarly de-registered by Panama.
The emergence of a fraudulent flag comes as a blow to the Timor-Leste administration that had plans to resuscitate a legitimate flag registry that historically had been used to register a niche trade in floating armouries.
The last floating armoury to be flagged by Timor-Leste, OTS Yeoman (IMO: 7114197), sank in mysterious circumstances in the Red Sea earlier this year.
In November last year, a delegation from the International Maritime Organization in London flew to Tibar, Timor-Leste, for a week-long national workshop aimed at helping the country meet its international obligations under IMO conventions and strengthen its maritime governance.
It brought together 23 officials from Timor-Leste’s Maritime Administration to enhance their understanding of the obligations of flag states under IMO instruments.
Since that meeting, however, it appears that the establishment of a fraudulent registry overtook the government’s own plans.
Timor-Leste is by no means the only government struggling to contain the recent outbreak of fraudulent registries being established apparently without their knowledge.
Last month, Lloyd’s List revealed how the government of Malawi had been targeted in an almost identical scam where at least four sanctioned tankers started using a fictitious flag.
Since then the Malawian Ministry of Transport and Public Works has written to both the IMO and Interpol in a bid to shut down that operation.
The letter sent to the IMO and subsequently circulated to all IMO member states confirms earlier statements issued to Lloyd’s List explaining the country does not operate an international ships registry.
In the letter, Malawi’s permanent representative to IMO called for action against those ships claiming to be flagged by the landlocked country.
“The Government of the Republic of Malawi would like to clarify that, currently, Malawi does not have an international ship registry. Therefore, those vessels are fraudulently registered, and it is our conviction that the appropriate action has to be taken against the fraudsters. Should Malawi open an international registry in the future, the IMO and other relevant institutions will be duly informed,” wrote Secretary for Transport and Public Works David Mzandu.
Mzandu has also asked Interpol to help investigate the fraudsters activities, which he explained had involved them “providing signatures, a fake government seal, contact details, and an entity that is not related to the Malawi Government”.
As Lloyd’s List has previously reported, the details of the fraudulent entity Malawi Maritime Administration, were entered into the IMO’s official GSIS database as a point of contact for Malawi’s ship certification services.
The details entered into GSIS for all contact points are updated by the member states themselves, not the IMO Secretariat. Any update is entered via a secure login specific to each member state.
Nobody from the Malawi High Commission in London was aware of how the details of a fraudulent operation were loaded into GSIS.
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