Nation.com.pk, 14 Jul 2012According to data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence ship-tracking service, their new beachhead on Tuvalu consists of some half dozen new nominal corporate owners, holding one tanker apiece and sharing as an address a post office box in Vaiaku, the village housing Tuvalu’s main administrative buildings on the atoll of Funafuti, the island-state’s capital. The rest of the NITC oil tankers reflagged to Tuvalu now show up on Lloyd’s as owned by companies in such opaque corporate havens as the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands; though for all these vessels, NITC remains the commercial operator.
On Thursday, the US Treasury added NITC in Tehran, plus most of its newly-reflagged tankers, to the US blacklist. But that only constrains business done under US jurisdiction or by US citizens. It does not necessarily extend to places such as Tuvalu, Tanzania and Singapore. For years now, this kind of arrangement has been a gaping hole in the Iran sanctions net. Full story
