Expanding tanker shadow fleet darkens all shipping

Sanctions SOS founder and chief executive Ian Bolton said the UK and EU had moved in parallel with the United States and showed readiness to apply secondary-style pressure on third-country facilitators, insurers and reinsurers. He anticipated uneven enforcement inside the EU and a drift towards less-regulated fleets as a result. “Sanctions are here to stay,” he said.

On market conditions, Ms Wiese Bockmann pointed to a jump in very large crude carrier spot returns and said policy had moved from keeping Russian barrels moving under a cap to halting flows. She cited spoofing and dark STS transfers linking sanctioned and clean tonnage, and described Baltic authorities questioning dubious ships while tracking registry switches near coastal waters.

Mr Hånell anticipated further growth in non-compliant capacity and short-term earnings strength before a new equilibrium. He said older vessels without class, insurance or maintenance oversight increased collision and crew risks, noting that accidents could happen more easily.

Looking ahead, Ms Grunewald forecast uncertainty and urged stakeholders to hard-wire flexibility into contracts and risk assessments. Mr Bolton said recent experience across sectors had equipped compliance teams to adapt quickly. Ms Wiese Bockmann suggested that inefficient routes and longer tonne miles would favour compliant owners and might spur attention on governance gaps.

Closing the webinar, Ms Sasson said stakeholders would increasingly connect automatic identification system (AIS) data, radio-frequency collection data and optical imagery to detect dark activity and protect operations, citing Windward experiments that integrated remote sensing with object detection near Malta.

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