Splash247: African flags fly high with the dark fleet

Three African flags – Comoros, Gambia, Sao Tome – stand out in the July edition of Clarksons World Fleet Monitor for their extraordinary growth. 

Comoros is now the second-largest ship register in Africa, its fleet size growing by 251.3% this year. The average age of the 595 ships flying there Comoros flag is 30.4 years. Gambia’s registered fleet has shot up by 231.5%, while Sao Tome has nearly doubled, up 93.7% this year, according to data from Clarksons Research. 

Earlier this month, the European Union and the United Kingdom sanctioned Intershipping Services, a UAE-based company that operates the flag registries of Gabon and Comoros, both of which have played a central role in supporting the opaque tanker network transporting sanctioned 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).

Comoros is also notorious for its involvement in Iran-linked oil shipments, and both it and Gabon frequently appear in sanctions evasion alerts related to illicit trade with Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. 

According to maritime analytics firm Windward, Benin has become the newest country exploited by Iran’s dark fleet, with two VLCCs falsely claiming its flag. Azelia, a 2009-built VLCC, is currently broadcasting Benin’s flag — one designated as false by the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Another VLCC, Flora, is also falsely flagged under Benin. 

Both tankers were sanctioned in February by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for their involvement in Iran’s illicit oil trade. Following these sanctions, Panama — the previous flag registry for both ships — stripped them of their registration.

Over the past nine months, other registries that have been fraudulently exploited include Aruba, Curacao, Guinea, Guyana, Eswatini, Malawi, and St Maarten.