| Subject: |
|
Tuvalu - North Korea -Heroin Part II |
| Name: |
|
D. |
| Date Posted: |
|
Oct 22, 06 - 7:23 AM |
| Message: |
|
North Korea: North Korean Ploy Masks Ships Under Other Flags
by Keith Bradsher, (20 Oct 2006)
Cont.
Changing the registration of a ship -- and therefore its flag -- is fairly simple. A ship owner simply sends the necessary paperwork to a country's ship registry, along with a fee of as little as $1,000. The vessel is not required to visit the country where it is registered, or even go to port.
Ship registries do require basic information about a vessel's length and tonnage. So if a ship of a certain size and displacement disappears from one ship's registry and a vessel of equal size and displacement pops up with a different name on another registry at the same time, they may be the same ship and could be identified with careful sleuthing, Mr. Wolfe said.
The Pong Su sailed from North Korea to Singapore in 2003 under a North Korean flag. The vessel then switched its registration to Tuvalu and sailed on to Australia, where witnesses saw a dinghy coming ashore with what proved to be the shipment of heroin.
The freighter was seized and later used as a bombing target by the Australian armed forces as a warning to drug traffickers. The North Korean government denied that it had been involved.
Without specifically mentioning flags of convenience, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned on Wednesday of the difficulty of monitoring North Korea's trade. "There's so much moving around the world by land, sea and air that it is practically impossible -- not impossible, but certainly it would take a lot of countries cooperating with a high degree of cohesion," and cohesion has been lacking, he said during a question-and-answer period at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama.
Until 2002, North Korea tended to register its ships as Cambodian, using a registration office that the Cambodian government had authorized in Singapore. Marcus Hand, the Asia editor for Lloyd's List, a shipping industry newspaper, said dozens of North Korean ships used to carry the Cambodian flag.
He cautioned, however, that it is often difficult to know with certainty who owns a ship, since ships are often held through various companies registered all over the world. No one outside North Korea really knows for sure how many cargo vessels the country has registered under other flags.
Cambodia canceled the right of its Singapore agents to register ships in 2002 after finding that Cambodian-registered ships were in such poor condition that ports were reluctant to let them berth, and after France accused a Cambodian-registered ship and its crew of transporting cocaine. The government of Cambodia ended up authorizing representatives in Pusan, South Korea, to manage the country's ship registry.
Charlie Bach, the managing director of the overhauled International Ship Registry of Cambodia, said in an e-mail message that there were no longer any North Korean ships carrying the Cambodian flag.
The mystery lies in where North Korea's ships are registered instead.
Several shipping executives said they believed that North Korean ships were sailing under Mongolian and Tuvaluan flags now.
The Tuvalu ship registry said Friday in an e-mail statement that it had been reorganized in May 2004 and had no vessels previously on North Korean or Cambodian registries. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hey Webmasters! New Photo Album Service Launched - Check it out!
Reply
Home
bravenet.com