TONGA has launched investigations into claims that 10 ships operating illegally in the East and South China Seas are falsely flying the kingdom’s flag.
The ships – mostly oil tankers – are being used to carry sanctioned crude from Russia, Iran, or Venezuela in an attempt to escape bans placed by the European Union and United Nations.
Radio New Zealand has reported that at least 10 sanctioned vessels in the East China and South China seas are falsely flying under the flag of Tonga.
But Tonga closed its International Ship Registry in 2002 after Tongan-registered ships were found to be used by groups allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.
Shipping expert, Mark Douglas, told RNZ: “It’s just not something that Tonga is known for doing…. if they don’t have insurance and they’re not well maintained, if there’s an accident it would be in the hands of the flag state to fix that problem.’’
Douglas told RNZ Pacific that the vessels tracked through a Malaysian port at East Johor, which, according to reporting by Bloomberg last year, was a notorious place for Iranian crude oil to be rebranded as Malaysian, before being exported to China.
UN and EU sanctions are designed to restrict the movement of oil, military supplies, or people to countries like Russia and North Korea, which allegedly sponsor terrorist activities.
The sanctions usually ban vessels from ports, prohibit services, freeze assets, and prevent access to territorial waters, impacting global trade and energy markets.
Sometimes the vessels transmit a false identity, doing so through the global Automatic Identification System (AIS), which port authorities use to stop ships from running into each other.
Tonga and Fiji have been named by the internationally recognised Lloyd’s registry as countries whose flags have been used fraudulently by sanctioned ships globally.