Two shipping registries that have been making plenty of Splash headlines this year have been added to the list of flags of convenience (FOC) tallied by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF).
Gabon and Eswatini – both flags strongly associated with so-called dark fleet transportation – have been added to the ITF’s list.
“It’s a toxic industry – registering ships in countries where there is no regulation, no oversight and no accountability. It allows for exploitation and the abandonment of seafarers. The aim is to provide a short cut for shipowners to generate money without necessarily complying with best practice risk mitigation and due diligence through regulatory accountability,” said Paddy Crumlin, president of the ITF.
The ITF defines an FOC vessel as one flying the flag of a country other than its actual ownership. This practice occurs despite international law – the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – stating that there must be a “genuine link” between the ship and the flag state.
David Heindel, ITF’s seafarers’ section chair, said: “The whole flags of convenience system is complex on purpose. The reasons for registering ships under flags of convenience is to avoid tax, avoid safety regulations, and circumvent labour standards and human rights.”
Both Gabon and Eswatini’s registries have been involved in the growing, so-called shadow or dark fleets transporting sanctioned oil.
Eswatini, the landlocked southern African kingdom formerly known as Swaziland, has been in and out of the news since last year when the Eswatini Maritime Affairs and International Ship Registry was formed as a private company in Singapore. The International Maritime Organization has since listed a number of vessels that paid to flag with the African nation as ‘False Eswatini’.
Africa lays claim to many fast-growing flags for ships facing sanctions.
The registries of Gabon, the Comoro Islands and Guinea-Bissau have each more than doubled in size in 2024 so far, taking on a significant tranche of the so-called shadow tanker fleet in the process.
Gabon, a small Central African nation on the Atlantic coast, was last year’s fastest-growing shipping registry, a growth trajectory that was boosted in the opening weeks of 2024 with the reflagging of a swathe of the Sovcomflot fleet.
Latest data from Clarksons Research shows Gabon is now the 30th largest shipping register in the world and the second largest in Africa with 7.4m gt on its books and has grown by 138.4% in the first quarter of this year alone. A month prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 27 months ago, the African nation had just 0.8m gt registered.
Among the ships on Gabon’s books was the Pablo, a 1997-built aframax that exploded in Malaysian waters (pictured) killing three crewmembers in May last year. The destroyed, uninsured ship, with a history of hauling Iranian oil, was one of the shipping images of 2023, a stark reminder of the risks associated with the dark tanker fleet.
The flag of the Comoro Islands, meanwhile, has grown by 109% so far this year, but in percentage terms, the fastest grower has been Guinea-Bissau, a West African register that had no ships on its books when Russia went to war but has grown by 333.8% in the year-to-date with Turkish owners among key clients.
In early 2022, Pireaus-based G-B International was appointed to run the open registry of Guinea-Bissau. The registry also has an office in Lebanon.
In 1922, the transfer of two passenger liners, the Reliance and the Resolute, from the U.S. to the Panamanian registry represented the first major step in the development of the flag of convenience system. Panama offered ship registration in a country free of burdensome laws and regulations found elsewhere. In this case, the passenger liner company wished to avoid the U.S. prohibition laws against serving alcohol on board.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/spain/panama.html
Evading and escaping, nothing changes.
The UN Convention on Ship Registration 1986, along with its UNCLOS based ‘genuine link’ obligations never came into force. Big shipowner power and money made sure of that. So now we have ships registers in countries with no shipping legislation and no intention to create any or enforce it. Meantime, the IMO fiddles while seafarers are abandoned or die on board unsafe ships. ‘Sorry’, says the IMO, ‘as a UN agency we have no power to enforce our Conventions’, and then deftly pass the enforcement buck to dodgy FOCs. Thank goodness then for the Port State Control (PSC) system, originally created by a group of European states (not the IMO) to audit seafarer labour conditions. PSC and its ‘no more favourable treatment’ process of FOC vessels which are not IMO and ILO convention compliant is now the world’s most effective maritime convention enforcement system. And let’s not forget the ITF who do not dance to the tune of the IMO’s fiddle and keep on banging the drum for seafarer rights and safer ships.