Dark fleet’ of sanction-busting ships taking Iranian to China pose stark environmental hazard

Iran makes billions of dollars and defies Western sanctions selling its oil via its “dark fleet” of tankers, ageing vessels that employ a range of tactics to avoid detection.

Sanctions have bedevilled Iranian oil vessels for years. Inset, two tankers transferring Iranian oil created a huge spill in the Persian Gulf

In the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, hidden from the world, two ageing oil tankers pulled up close.

Anchored side by side, the Fortune Galaxy – a sanctioned ship infamous for smuggling Iranian oil and breaching maritime law – and the Serano II started a risky manoeuvre, transferring oil in the open sea.

The next day, satellite imagery captured the disastrous result: a 5km oil slick, equating to thousands of barrels of oil, turning the surface of the Gulf silver.

The spill is the latest in a series of incidents involving so-called dark fleet tankers, ageing ships operating outside maritime law to transport oil from Iran and Russia and often operating without transponders to avoid detection, evading international sanctions.

Its discovery, by tracking firm TankerTrackers, comes as Iranian tankers rapidly vacate the country’s major terminals due to fears of Israeli strikes on oil facilities. Oil prices have begun to rise as traders priced in the risks to global supplies by Iran’s rocket attack on Israel, and the possible Israeli response.

Sanctions prevent Iran from trading with large parts of the world. But it has found a ready buyer in China, which gets 15 per cent of its oil from Iran – a supply threatened by the conflict.

This equates to more than 90 per cent of all Iranian exports, with profits for Iran estimated at $US2bn a month. The demand from China is so great that Iran’s oil production has largely recovered to the levels it reached before Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in 2018. But the oil still has to reach China. That means finding a way around the Western financial system and shipping services.

Here enters Iran’s dark fleet. Daniel Roth, research director at the non-profit United Against Nuclear Iran, said Tehran was “almost entirely dependent” on a “ghost armada” of 400 tankers registered outside the country.

The Fortune Galaxy was identified in 2022 by the group as a tanker used by the Iranian regime to transport oil despite sanctions. The ship itself, as well as the company that operates it, has since been hit directly with US Treasury sanctions over its links to a financier for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Absent this fleet, the regime would be down well over $US100bn in lost exports revenues over the past four years. That’s a lot of money unavoidably earmarked for terrorist proxies, ballistic missiles and drones programs, and the nuclear file,” Mr Roth said.

“The dark fleet uses an array of deceptive practices to evade sanctions and tracking … physically masking and altering how the ship looks, falsifying cargo documentation, conducting ‘ship-to-ship’ transfers, persistent ‘flag-hopping’ (changing the flag under which a ship sails) and manipulating satellite transponders.”

While not illegal, ship-to-ship transfers are considered a red flag for smuggling and sanctions evasion, and are supposed to be carried out within designated transfer zones. Authorities in Greece and around the Baltic Sea have sought to deter such transfers, and Finland even proposed the EU buys an oil spill response vessel to keep on standby.

Yet despite global concern, the majority of transfers and spills go unreported – or unnoticed. Samir Madani, founder of TankerTracker, said dark fleet oil spills were increasingly common.

THE TIMES