EU plans to impose sanctions against companies that provided counterfeit flags to dark fleet tankers - Bloomberg

The new package of anti-Russian sanctions that the European Union is forming may include three companies that issued fictitious registration documents to Russian tankers in certain jurisdictions. Bloomberg writes about this with reference to relevant documents.

The companies, which risk being sanctioned, made fictitious registrations for at least eight tankers of the Russian “shadow fleet” in the state entities of Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten (all of which are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands). We are talking about false flag vessels - that is, those that claim to be registered in a certain jurisdiction where they are not actually registered.

None of the listed three territories appears in the so-called Paris Register of Official Flags - that is, formally they cannot provide ship registration services, the agency notes. In May, the Netherlands told the International Maritime Organization that some firms were issuing “fake certificates” in the name of Sint Maarten.

The measures being discussed may become part of the 19th package of EU sanctions against Russia. About 120 more vessels associated with Russia may be included in it, media reported last week. Measures against firms registering ships are being discussed for the first time.

The use of false flags by “shadow fleet” tankers is a common practice. Such vessels are more difficult to track and identify in monitoring systems. At the same time, a false flag is now one of the few legal grounds for detaining tankers: ships without a flag do not have the right to freedom of navigation. So, in April of this year, Estonia detained the Russian “shadow fleet” tanker Kiwala, which was sailing under the flag of Djibouti, but, as it turned out, it was not on any register. At the end of September, the same ship (now called Boracay) was stopped by the French authorities.