Ship trackers said on Thursday that two more tankers were able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz with their transponders turned off. One ship is headed for India, while the other is bound for China.
The ship headed for India is the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) Nissos Keros, flagged to the Marshall Islands and chartered by Swiss-based trading company Vitol.
The ship is carrying 1.8 million barrels of crude oil from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and is headed for India’s port of Visakhapatnam, which is the location of a refinery owned by Hindustan Petroleum, a subsidiary of India’s state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation.
The other ship is a liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker called Hua Lin Wan, sailing under the Chinese flag and operated by China’s state-owned COSCO shipping corporation. The tanker is carrying a cargo of naphtha from Kuwait, and is scheduled to arrive at China’s port of Huizhou in about two weeks.
COSCO president Lin Ji told Lloyd’s List on Thursday that his company is “coordinating vessel withdrawals,” and regards the safety of its ships and crew as the highest priority. Lin did not specify who COSCO was “coordinating” with.
Three other Chinese ships sailed toward the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, one of them openly broadcasting its position and its identity as a Chinese vessel, but all three turned back. The Nissos Keros and Hua Lin Wan reportedly completed the crossing with their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders turned off.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that a third ship, the LNG tanker Umm Al Ashtan, stopped transmitting its tracking data while it was off the coast of the UAE on May 1, but suddenly reappeared on Wednesday off the coast of Oman and headed for India with a cargo loaded from the Emirati terminal on Das Island.
The UAE’s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), listed as manager of the Umm Al Ashtan, declined to comment on its movements or how it might have passed safely through the Strait of Hormuz.
The new ships joined three LNG tankers and an oil tanker that made it safely through the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, carrying cargoes for Pakistan, China, and India. All of the owners and operators of these vessels declined to answer questions about whether they paid ransom to Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to obtain safe passage.
Shipping industry sources told Reuters that the government of Malaysia asked Iran to allow seven ships through the strait, including the oil supertanker VLCC Eagle Veracruz, which evidently passed through the Strait of Hormuz this week and is now headed for China’s port of Quanzhou with a load of crude oil from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday announced sanctions against Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA), the new organization created by the IRGC to extract “tolls” from international shipping.
The Treasury Department noted that all funds collected by PGSA are transferred to the IRGC, which was designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the U.S. government in April 2019.
“Anyone cooperating with the so-called strait authority may be providing support to and receiving services from the IRGC, which ultimately benefits from this attempted extortion, and may therefore be exposed to sanctions risk,” the Treasury Department warned.
“The Iranian military’s latest attempt to extort global maritime trade is proof that Economic Fury has left the regime desperate for cash,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday.
“Through Economic Fury, the United States has imposed a financial stranglehold on the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Treasury has deprived the Iranian regime of revenue for their weapons programs, terrorist proxies, and nuclear ambitions,” he said.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we will remain relentless in our pursuit to constrict the network of vessels, intermediaries, and buyers through which Iran exports both its oil and malevolence,” he vowed.