P&I coverage for more than 160 tankers shipping billions of dollars of sanctioned crude through some of the world’s busiest waterways ranges from a company with a GoDaddy website in Bulgaria to a Dubai-based club that retrospectively cancelled cover for one of its entered tankers involved in a serious oil spill

‘I imagine the willingness of Cypriot officials to enforce unilateral US sanctions comes down to diplomatic pressure from Washington,’ says a Washington DC-based consultant specialising in sanctions policy. ‘But I don’t think folks at the State Department will be eager to twist the arms of Cypriot officials’

Owners have found corporate workarounds to keep crude flowing even as the Greek Union of Shipowners discourages its members from returning to the trade

Don’t mistake the anticipated lifting of Iranian sanctions for an easing of compliance risk. For those banks and insurers seeking to apply transparency to the opaquest end of seaborne trade, many are only just realising how far they still need to go in order to mitigate the risk that the Trump era in some way helped expose. For shipping, this means more investment in due diligence and surveillance. Amalie Korning Wedege, head of sanctions compliance at Danske Bank, and Leigh Hansson, a partner at the law firm Reed Smith specialising in sanctions compliance for shipping, tell Lloyd’s List editor Richard Meade how shipping can navigate the murky waters of sanctions risk and compliance

Advanced predictive analytics and artificial intelligence software have augmented vessel movements monitoring to create a next-generation compliance tool that can alert users to deceptive shipping behaviours and flag ‘dark’ operations

While US enforcement of sanctioned Iranian oil trades has left tankers a highly visible compliance target, tracked by government agencies and industry alike, Iran’s container fleet has sailed under the political radar and continued to quietly trade with international partners

Ofac said the Houthis have used ballistic missiles, explosives, naval mines, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to strike military targets, population centres, infrastructure, and nearby commercial shipping in Saudi Arabia, along key international trade routes

Mysterious Piraeus-based Edge Maritime has four suezmaxes shipping Venezuelan crude

President Biden said that ‘additional steps’ were necessary to address the national emergency declared in his predecessor’s executive order in November 2020, including the threat posed by China’s ‘the military-industrial complex’

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai last week called attention to the issue, saying forced labour ‘harms the lives and wellbeing of fishers and workers around the world and it must be eliminated’

Lloyd’s List’s analysis of shipping’s sustainability and ESG reports shows decarbonisation but an alarming lack of clarity from owners on meeting future emission targets; how the lifting of Iranian sanctions will do little to lift the burden of compliance risk; uncertainty surrounding a potential recovery in product tanker rates

The Trump era of ‘maximum pressure’ campaigns may be recast under the Biden administration, but the requirement to monitor maritime risk is now embedded within financial, insurance and political processes. All signs point to an increasingly complex global regime well beyond the current focus on US compliance