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.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS