Israeli maritime analytics firm Windward is reporting that the government of Comoros has begun a clean-out of its international registry, a flag which has been central to sanctions-circumventing dark fleet tankers shipping Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil.
There are now 62 tankers, three liquefied petroleum gas carriers and one tug declared as falsely flying the Comoros flag, according to the Equasis database. All but one of the falsely flagged Comoros ships was sanctioned by either the US, EU or UK and engaged in Russia, Iranian or Venezuelan trades as of September 14, Windward data show.
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Windward research in August showed that Comoros flagged 38% of sanctioned dark fleet tonnage over 20,000 dwt that was not falsely flagged, followed by Gambia, Cameroon and Sierra Leone. 57% of sanctioned tonnage was falsely flagged, or the flag was unknown.
Data as of August 1 this year from Clarksons Research places Comoros as the 25th largest shipping register in the world, with 615 ships on its books, and its registered fleet growing by 274% this year.
In July, the European Union and the United Kingdom sanctioned Intershipping Services, a UAE-based company that operates the flag registries of Comoros and Gabon, another African flag strongly associated with the movement of Russian crude.
Both Gabon and Comoros have long attracted scrutiny from port state control authorities. Comoros, in particular, has become synonymous with high-risk maritime behaviour. It ranks on the Paris MOU blacklist, is red-flagged by the US Coast Guard, and is consistently in the top tier of crew abandonment cases, according to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF).
In addition to false flag ships sailing under legitimate flags, Windward has identified a further 12 fraudulent registries being used by the dark fleet.
These are Angola, Aruba, Benin, Curacao, Eswatini, Guinea, Guyana, Mali, Malawi, Mozambique, St Maarten, and Timor Leste.
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