Singapore-flagged oil tanker EM Longevity made its final voyage almost three years ago, after more than two decades at sea. Earlier this month, ship-tracking data showed it arriving at a Chinese port, loaded with crude and ready to discharge.
With the expansion of the dark fleet moving restricted oil around the world, new tactics are constantly emerging. So-called “zombie vessels,” which assume the identity of legitimate, but defunct ships, are among the tools used by operators to circumvent tightening restrictions and to manipulate the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, tracking system.
In this case, the EM Longevity was a very large crude carrier built in 2000. In December 2021, at the end of its useful life, records show it was sent to a scrapyard in Bangladesh.
Photo: Bloomberg
However, on Monday last week, a tanker bearing its identity number showed up at a terminal in Dalian in China’s Liaoning Province. It then left that port, having partially unloaded, and sailed across the Yellow Sea in China’s northeast. On Sunday, it docked at Yantai, a port city in Shandong Province, according to ship-tracking and satellite data.
Past dark fleet practices would indicate the vessel in Yantai simply took on the identity of the broken-up, legitimate EM Longevity.
However, it was not immediately possible to exclude the less likely option that the old tanker was resurrected from the scrapyard.
“Regardless of whether it’s the same ship or not, why would you want to reactivate a crude-oil tanker that’s 24 years old?” said Jan Stockbruegger, a research fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Ocean Infrastructure Research Group. “This seems like a vessel that’s signaling that it’s legitimate just so that it can sail under the radar.”
The EM Longevity’s International Maritime Organization registration number does not indicate a current manager, owner or insurer on ship-tracking databases, including Bloomberg.
According to data from VesselTracker, a database of maritime information, the tanker now sails under the flag of Eswatini. The landlocked African kingdom has said that hundreds of ships use its flag without permission.
The EM Longevity’s doppelganger bears other hallmarks of the dark fleet. It started to sail past the Straits of Hormuz into the waters near Iran around Aug. 11, half full of cargo, ship-tracking data show. For two days it sailed on to a spot past Iran’s Kharg Island which has an oil terminal, and stayed there for another three days, before making its way through the Persian Gulf back toward the Straits of Hormuz.
By the end of the month, the laden zombie ship had made its way through the Straits of Malacca, then past Singapore before heading north toward China. By the middle of this month, the vessel was in the Yellow Sea between Liaoning and Shandong provinces.
Sea Agility Pte, listed as EM Longevity’s previous manager on shipping databases including Equasis, did not respond to requests for comment by e-mail or phone.
China’s so-called teapot refiners, many of them based in Shandong, have become all but reliant on less expensive crude from sanctioned regimes in recent years, emerging in particular as key buyers of Iranian oil.
Imports of Iranian crude into China are set to reach a record high of 1.79 million barrels per day this month, data from Kpler show.
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS