When President Obama visited Tanzania last week, he praised the East African country as a place with which he feels a “special connection.” A glitch he did not mention is that Tanzania has developed a special connection of its own -- to Iran’s main oil tanker fleet. Since turning up last year as a leading flag of convenience for sanctioned Iranian ships, Tanzania just can’t seem to cut itself loose.
That’s not for lack of Tanzanian promises. Last summer, a number of U.S. lawmakers voiced bipartisan protest over Tanzania’s flagging of at least 36 sanctioned Iranian vessels, urging that the Obama administration penalize Tanzania itself unless it kicked this habit. Tanzanian authorities first denied there were any Iranian ships registered under their flag. Then they conceded there were, but said that all such ships would be deregistered. By last December, they were saying the deregistration was complete.
That’s not what ship-tracking data suggests. Analysis of information on Lloyd’s List Intelligence shipping database shows that dozens of tankers blacklisted by the U.S. as owned by the government of Iran are still signaling as flagged to Tanzania.
Tougher U.S. sanctions that took effect July 1 under the Iran Freedom and Counter-proliferation Act of 2012 (IFCA) are meant. among other things, to help shut down Iran’s foreign-flagging operations, potentially targeting the provision of registry, flagging and classification services to Iran’s shipping sector. But over the past month, at least 39 Iranian oil tankers have signaled as registered to Tanzania, 34 of them since the beginning of July. That number accounts for well over half the crude carriers of Iran’s main tanker fleet, owned by NITC, formerly known as the National Iranian Tanker Company.
The most curious aspect of this continuing Tanzania connection is that according to Lloyd’s, only 12 of the 39 tankers signaling within the past month as flagged to Tanzania are actually registered there. The rest were previously listed as flagged to Tanzania. They now appear as flag “unknown.” But they have continued to identify themselves in shipping traffic as flagged to Tanzania. The tell-tale sign is a nine-digit number known as a Maritime Mobile Service Identity number, or MMSI, part of the onboard signaling system that transmits the registered identity of a ship as well as its location. The MMSI number is unique for each vessel, but the initial three digits identify the ship’s flag state (677 for Tanzania).
Why might Iran engage in such artifice? Sanctions have made it risky in many places to service Iranian ships, and tough or impossible for Iranian ships to obtain reputable insurance and other documentation vital to international shipping. A foreign flag can help provide NITC tankers with a layer of convenient camouflage and access that they might not enjoy if flagged to their heavily sanctioned mother country, Iran.
That’s a serious problem for U.S. sanctions enforcers, who have been trying to curtail the oil income that fuels Tehran’s repressive, terrorist-sponsoring, nuclear-proliferating regime. Iran’s tankers are a big link in the oil supply chain. So, last July the U.S. Treasury targeted their owner, Tehran-based NITC. Stating that NITC, which claims to be a private outfit, is actually “a Government of Iran entity,” Treasury added NITC, plus a slew of its affiliates and 58 of its vessels to the U.S. sanctions list. More NITC vessels have been added since.
“We have chased them out of most of the reputable registries in the world,” says a State Department official, interviewed this week on background about NITC’s sanctions-dodging tactics. For some time, Iranian tankers have been trying to evade sanctions not only by changing names, flags and nominal owners, but by temporarily turning off their onboard signaling systems in order to mask oil smuggling, including ship-to-ship transfers at sea. Last December Reuters reported on three Iranian tankers that were swapping signaling identities with other ships, apparently for such purposes as helping Syrian vessels mask their activities. But if Iran has adopted a policy of flagrantly violating maritime conventions by using shipping signals of countries where its ships are no longer registered, then according to this State Department official, that would be breaking new ground.
Many of these Tanzania-signaling NITC tankers appear quite busy, traveling well beyond the Gulf, to places ranging from China to Syria (where Iran supports the Assad regime in its bloody fight to retain power). Take, for instance, one of these Iranian tankers, named the Baikal, previously listed by Lloyd’s as flagged to Tanzania; now listed as flag unknown, but still signaling as Tanzanian. In May, the Baikal departed Iran’s offshore oil export terminal at Kharg Island in the Gulf, transited the Suez Canal and called in mid-June at the Syrian port of Banias, before returning through Suez to the Gulf -- where she last clocked in this Thursday, signaling as a Tanzanian-flagged ship, back near Kharg.
While Iran in its sanctions-busting efforts has shuffled most of its merchant ships through a razzle-dazzle of name changes, flag states and shell company owners, the ships themselves can be identified by their unique hull numbers, or IMOs, issued under authority of the International Maritime Organization for the life of every large ship. Treasury, on its sanctions list, includes IMO numbers for ships, making it hard to argue that foreign registries have no way of knowing which ships U.S. sanctions authorities have blacklisted as Iranian.
In the case of Tanzania, great murk surrounds the question of whether Tanzania is somehow a collaborator in Iran’s shipping schemes, or a victim. Since last August, Tanzanian authorities have repeatedly denied that their country is still providing cover to Iranian ships. Last December, Tanzania’s ambassador to the United Nations, Tuvako Manongi, told me that Tanzanian authorities were “just as frustrated” as their American counterparts that Iranian vessels kept showing up as Tanzanian. My more recent queries to officials at Tanzania’s embassy in Washington and U.N. mission in New York received no reply.
U.S. government officials have repeatedly ducked questions about the situation. When I asked a Treasury spokesman why the Tanzania-Iran shipping connection appears to have dragged on for 11 months after Tanzania promised to call it quits, he said Treasury declined to comment, and referred me to the State Department. At the State Department, a spokesperson emailed me that the relevant Tanzanian authorities “are being cooperative and forthcoming,” adding that “The situation is evolving and the State Department continues to alert the Tanzanian government when new information emerges tying Tanzanian-flagged vessels to Iranian ownership.”
Part of the problem may be that Tanzania’s balkanized ship-flagging arrangements do not lend themselves to transparency or straightforward supervision. Tanzania’s flag also represents the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar, run by the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, which has its own maritime registry.
Some time ago, Zanzibar contracted out its ship registration services to a private company called Philtex Corporation, with offices spread around the globe, in places such as Dubai, the U.S. and the Philippines. Philtex is run by an American named Chris Warren, who described himself in an email to me last summer as “a US citizen and small business owner in Austin, Texas.”
On the Philtex web site, as it appeared last year, Warren was described as president of the company -- though that detail has since disappeared from the site. So has Philtex’s listing of an affiliated office in Iran, with the contact given as Masoud Zakian, of Zakian Surveyors and Loss Adjusters LLC, complete with Iranian phone numbers, Sometime between July and October, the Iran office vanished from the Philtex site, and Zakian’s coordinates migrated to Sharjah, UAE. Soon after that, Zakian disappeared from the site.
From its Dubai office, Philtex has been running the Tanzania Zanzibar International Register of Shipping, or TZIRS. Last August Reuters reported that according to Tanzanian authorities, Philtex had been registering Iranian ships under the Tanzanian flag without their knowledge, and now that this had been discovered, the Philtex contract would be canceled. Last December, Tanzania’s ambassador Manongi told me the Philtex contract had been “terminated.”
But when I reached Chris Warren by phone at his home in Texas late last month, he told me that Philtex is still managing the Tanzania Zanzibar shipping registry. He added that all the Iranian ships previously registered had been “canceled.” Asked why these canceled Iranian tankers were still signaling as flagged to Tanzania, he said he didn’t know, but “We can absolutely prove these ships are not registered to us.” He added that his company had provided such proof to the U.S. embassy in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam (when I asked State Department officials if this was true, they neither confirmed nor denied). Warren added that in any event “It is not against the law for a Tanzanian to register an Iranian-flagged ship.”
What to make of this? In February, a New York-based watchdog organization called United Against Nuclear Iran, or UANI, released the results of an inquiry it had made into the persistent links between Tanzania’s flag and Iran’s tankers. UANI is run by a former U.S. envoy to the U.N., Mark Wallace. In a letter addressed to the president of Tanzania, the ruler of Dubai, and Obama, among others, Wallace alleged that Philtex was an “illegitimate front company,” issuing “key shipping documentation” to Iran’s “illicit oil-carrying ships.” Wallace wrote that this was part of “an Iranian-sponsored fraud, which is designed to avoid the full impact of sanctions against Iran.” He included a description of oil-smuggling methods employed by Tanzanian-flagged Iranian ships, and appended a sheaf of exhibits, including copies of some of the Iranian ship documents issued via Philtex and the TZIRS.
Asked about these allegations, Chris Warren has denied any wrong-doing. Philtex Vice-President in Dubai, Jocelyn Acosta, had also previously denied any wrong-doing, in a December letter to Wallace that he included among UANI’s exhibits. In it, Acosta began by accusing Wallace of bamboozling “law-abiding, self-respecting simple minded people” with his “self-appointed special interest Israeli-American Zionists Neocon private organization pushing a special agenda by exploiting the United States’ name, its people and locations.” She went on to say that Philtex, worldwide, was “fully certified, registered, properly endorsed,” and in compliance with the laws of the UAE.
Whatever the reality beneath this tangle, there’s one clear bottom line: The continuing confusion is working to Iran’s benefit. While the various officials in Washington, Dubai, Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar have been denying, deflecting, obfuscating, permitting or working diligently and agreeably to figure out what’s really going on, Iran’s tankers have been sailing the seas, trafficking the oil that keeps the clock of the Tehran regime ticking toward nuclear midnight.
Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project.
