November 01-2013
A maritime industry website says it has found a new tanker that Iran is using to hide oil sales in order to duck under US sanctions.
The tanker is following an old practice that Iran adopted as soon as the major sanctions on oil sales were imposed in July of last year. Iran loads a tanker with crude and sends it somewhere in the world to transfer that crude—at sea—to another tanker that can then sell it as crude from some other country. Often the receiving tanker is already half full of oil from another country so the blended oil won’t show up as Iranian if tested.
The website gCaptain.com reports that the tanker Ramtin is operating such transfers. Ramtin is owned by Tabuk Maritime, a firm sanctioned by the US Treasury for its links to the Iranian oil trade.
The website said the 163,000-ton Ramtin sailed from Iran with a full load of crude September 10.
MarInt, a predictive maritime analytics system, followed the Ramtin and noted that it began transmitting a new Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number while it passed through the Gulf of Oman on its way toward Singapore. In other words, it changed its ID number to hide who it was.
Its new MMSI number matched that of a much smaller tanker named Hamoda K, which was then on its way to Karachi from the UAE. Hamoda K is not on the US blacklist.
Both the Ramtin and the Hamoda K fly the flag of Togo.
The website said, “This ‘sharing’ of identity, together with the close proximity in time of the operations, appears to indicate that the Hamoda K is being manipulated to dis-guise Ramtin’s activities near Malaysia.
The Singapore/Malaysia region has been commonly used by other tankers that have transferred Iranian oil to other tankers at sea.
Ramtin arrived in the Singapore/Malaysia region September 30 and anchored about 18 miles offshore. The website said that as of Friday the Ramtin had not transmitted any new information about its draught – possibly indicating it had not yet transferred parts of its crude oil to a second tanker as of that date. But it has been anchored there a full month, suggesting there may be a problem selling the oil.
The US has caught several other tankers engaged in such transfers at sea for Iran and scuttled their operations. In one case, Iran capitalized a Greek to set up a firm with several tankers that engaged in such trade for a few months until the US Treasury Department exposed him.
