The U.S. Treasury release of November 4, 2026, says not a word about new tankers: no speed, no draft, no owner’s name—not a single familiar maritime heading. The target of the sanctions package was an office. More precisely, a family outfit from Chandigarh, where husband and wife Suniel Kumar Sharma and Jaspreet Preeti Shahid spent around twelve years selling the most unexpected service in the world: the existence of a country. Not citizenship, not a passport—the country itself, in which a vessel could be registered. The sanctions package did not strike the tankers, but the factory of legality: thirteen targets, including four individuals and nine companies, plus a fresh OFAC alert—a short but mercilessly specific warning to the industry on how to tell a real country from a printed one.
In September, I dissected the economics of legitimate open registries—“The Flag for Sale.” That story ended with the observation that some registries operate as commercial enterprises and can be bought and sold like any other business. Today—the other half of that market: registries with no country, no office, no authorization, but a website, a price list, and a queue of clients. And the first sanctions strike in history not against the buyer of a flag and not against the operator of the counter, but against the print shop.
A vessel without documents is not a vessel, but a floating coffin with a diesel engine: it will not be admitted to port, insured, or welcomed by a bank. To exist, a hull needs three things: a flag (registration in some state’s registry), class (confirmation of its technical condition by a classification society), and crew certificates. All of this can be issued only through a legitimate chain: a state opens a registry, a recognized classification society inspects the vessel, and a maritime administration issues documents to seafarers. The irony is that each element can also be bought separately—and an entire industry grew at precisely that intersection.
The Chandigarh office’s product is described in the Treasury release without any euphemisms: websites “offering services on behalf of countries that did not authorize them.” The services are standard—flagging, seafarer certification, vessel classification. The raw material—paid web domains. The client—a vessel rejected by every respectable outlet. According to OFAC, this operation impersonated the maritime administrations of Aruba, Guyana, Mali, Mozambique, Malawi, Sint Maarten, Timor-Leste, and Nicaragua—a list of jurisdictions that reads less like a roster of partners than a portrait of the target market: small, poor, or marginally present in maritime law, countries barely touched by the world’s paperwork economy and not seriously checked by anyone.
Among the vessels that received documents from this network, the Treasury names LATTAFA, VERA, and BINARY STAR—tankers carrying Iranian oil under flags printed in India. A separate showroom piece is the tanker PING SHUN, listed under the flag of an “Eswatini registry,” which we will get to below.
The most interesting thing about this case is not its scale, but its trajectory. According to the Treasury, the network began as a perfectly legitimate contractor. At various times, the registries of Dominica, Guyana, Eswatini, and Nicaragua genuinely contracted its people to do work—flag services, documentation, administration. The first recorded offense dates to 2014: Sharma attempted to impersonate Dominica’s flag administration—that is, to operate in the name of a country he no longer had the right to represent.
Then came exactly the arc every contractor follows after gaining access to a state’s name. The growth model was as straight as a conveyor belt. Contract work turned into expanding sales; the clientele shifted toward the sanctions-shadow fleet, which every country with a normal reputation had already rejected; then countries noticed their name turning up on lists of detained tankers, terminated their contracts, and publicly disavowed the operation. OFAC’s formula: “corruption and other risk indicators, such as provision of flags to shadow fleet vessels, resulted in these countries severing their business partnerships”.
And now for the element that makes the story unprecedented: after the contracts were terminated, the network kept printing. It did not leave, rebuild, or change its product—it simply continued issuing registrations in the name of countries that had already publicly repudiated it. “In several cases, the network continued to flag vessels long after the flag state had publicly denounced them as fraudulent”—quoted verbatim from the OFAC alert. Legality turned out to be a product with a very curious feature: the buyer does not care whether the seller is confirmed by the source itself. It merely has to look the part.
The central display piece of this new industry is the Kingdom of Eswatini, formerly Swaziland. In 2023, Sharma founded a Singapore company called “Eswatini Maritime Affairs and International Ship Registry PTE. Ltd.” The name reads perfectly: official, bureaucratic, with a ministerial ring to it. Even the commas are in the right places.
There is only one problem: this operation has nothing whatsoever to do with Eswatini. The kingdom is not even a member of the International Maritime Organization and has never created its own ship registry—as I noted in the September piece, every Eswatini flag in global shipping is counterfeit by definition. The country’s authorities publicly disavowed the Singapore firm. The registry responded like a franchisee whose license had been revoked: it kept operating. The vessel PING SHUN received documents from the “Eswatini registry” after the kingdom had already said no.
In parallel, the outfit experimented with cruder brands: “International Maritime Safety Agency of Guyana” was later replaced with “Laos Ship Registry and Maritime Safety Administration”—Guyana’s registry relocated to Laos without either state’s knowledge. The network removed that sign after the first press reports, but the empire’s accounting, according to OFAC, kept running: Sharma’s wife, Jaspreet Preeti Shahid, managed a “business empire” involving financial services, media streaming, and other ways of converting revenue. Nominee directors appeared in company filings—Ashwani Kumar Dhiman and Ishwinder Singh; both are now on the sanctions list as well. Family business plus nominees—the standard computational architecture of any gray market, from Dubai trading houses to sellers of fake diplomas.
The fake-legality industry has, besides the Chandigarh workshop, a branch in California—and that is not a metaphor. An investigation by Follow the Money found Maritime Safety & Technical Administration, a U.S.-registered company with an office in Beverly Hills whose owners cannot be traced. MSTA sold registrations and flags from the island state of Sint Maarten—and here the technique is exactly the same, only subtler: Sint Maarten, a tiny constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has NO ship registry at all. It was not shut down, not suspended—it never existed. Every registration issued by this country is a forgery a priori.
By FTM’s count, MSTA sold at least 77 such fake flags to oil and gas tankers. Sint Maarten maritime administration inspector Paul Ellinger describes the escalation in almost the same terms as the Chandigarh workshop: “At first, these were just individual certificates; now they are registering vessels—oil tankers.” Global regulatory statistics, cited by the same investigation, put the number of such tankers at 222—almost sevenfold growth in two years; the U.S., EU, and UK have sanctioned 79 of them, most of them specifically over Iranian links.
Michelle Wiese Bockmann, Windward’s senior analyst for maritime intelligence, frames it as a diagnosis of the entire phenomenon: these vessels operate “completely outside of international maritime norms and regulations.” No professional legal language is needed here: a vessel that exists on paper, but not in international law.
Why buy such paper at all? The answer lies not in sentimental notions of maritime tradition, but in legal mechanics. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a vessel on the high seas falls under the jurisdiction of its flag state. If it has no valid flag, it has no nationality—legally, it does not exist. And something that does not exist has neither protector nor protection: under the same Convention, practically any state may stop and inspect it. In this logic, a fake flag is a patch for the registry: enter at least some nationality into the international database, so long as the line “does not exist” does not appear—a line under which any warship may approach with a boarding party.
The practice has already gone a long way. On April 22, 2026, the United States seized the tanker MAJESTIC X (IMO 9198317): the vessel was sailing under a “Guyanese” flag from the list printed by the same network, with Iranian oil aboard. The seizure took place without any consent from the real Guyana—because the real Guyana had nothing to do with that vessel. Follow the Money, which accompanied its February investigation with expert commentary, quotes Kiel international-law professor Nele Matz-Lück: the United States and France are interpreting the rules ever more broadly, driven by “the frustration of recent months and years—at having too little authority and wanting to act more forcefully.” In her formulation, the West is already going after vessels without nationality—and this is not a blockade of one particular country, but a global mechanism for stripping a vessel of its status as a legal subject.
The paper has a second function—an economic one. A false flag creates what OFAC calls a “veneer of legitimacy”—a façade of respectability behind which vessels obtain insurance (P&I), trade finance, and port services. A vessel carrying Iranian oil under a printed “Guyanese” flag can calmly enter port; a vessel without a flag draws the attention of port authorities, an insurer’s refusal, and—in the event of an accident—a bill for the coastal state that the Treasury estimates in the “billions of dollars”: a tanker with no real insurance aground off someone else’s coast is the most expensive scenario imaginable.
The third function of the November 4 sanctions is fundamental: for the first time in this campaign, the strike is not against a vessel or a registry operator, but against the producer of the papers. In July 2025, Intershipping Services—the operator of the Gabon and Comoros counters, that same company in a residential high-rise outside Dubai—was sanctioned. That was a sanction against the “pharmacy.” The current November 4 package is against the “chemical plant”: against the workshop that minted the registries themselves. The sanctions ladder has climbed step by step: first the vessel, then the flotilla manager, then the operator of the counter—and now the maker of the registries themselves.
The framework into which this move is fitted is Operation Economic Outcast, the Treasury campaign against Tehran’s revenue base, launched on August 24, 2026, with its rhetorical “Economic D-Day.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent describes the scope bluntly and militarily: “you are either with us or against us”—everyone servicing the Iranian economy “whether by land, sea, or air” will be hit. This is not empty rhetoric: the same package sanctioned Turkey’s Fugo Ground Services—not for fake flags, but for ground handling of sanctioned Iranian airlines. The sea is one workshop, the air another; contracting for legality and contracting for ground handling sit at the same level in the same hierarchy of intermediaries, and Washington has made clear that it is watching both workshops.
To understand exactly what is being struck, the fresh OFAC alert, “Iranian Shadow Fleet Reliance on False Flags for Sanctions Evasion,” helps—a two-page manifesto in which OFAC describes the business model so openly for the first time and teaches the industry how to spot a fake. The alert’s checklist should be read as an admission that the legality market has survived every previous barrier: maritime databases list a vessel under an “unknown” flag; the flag belongs to a jurisdiction databases often mark as fraudulent; an MMSI number—a vessel’s radio identity—with a country prefix that contradicts the claimed flag—that is, the vessel radios “I’m from Panama,” while the certificate says “Guyana”; the flag of a country with no known registry; and documents that cannot be verified. My favorite item is the second: the very fact that “flags frequently identified as fraudulent” have become a recognizable pattern means OFAC, in the official language of an alert, is acknowledging a display rack where such flags are laid out as a separate product.
A separate gesture in the alert is its appeal to countries whose names are being stolen: add a note in IMO/GISIS stating that these registrations are not yours. Technically, it is magnificent: the international database must acquire the line “our country is being forged”—victim states must go to the world’s accounting office and register their own theft.
The skeptical question that naturally arises here: if the industry was beheaded on November 4, will the market close? The answer lies in the statistics of the entire campaign. American and French boardings, ongoing since 2025, have genuinely cut down false flags: by autumn 2026, trackers estimated that roughly 2% of shadow-fleet oil exports were moving under fake flags, down from nearly a quarter a year earlier—the fake flag had ceased to be a safe haven because a vessel flying one could be stopped in any sea. The market’s answer was predictable: the client moved up the ladder of legality. In just the 18 months leading up to mid-2026, the Russian registry took in 107 sanctioned tankers (87% of them were already under sanctions at the time of the flag change)—and there you have the transition from a forgery at the “website + domain” level to a forgery at the level of “UN Security Council member”: a flag that is not forged because a frigate stands behind it. The right of visit under UNCLOS applies only to vessels without nationality; a vessel under the Russian flag cannot be stopped without risking conflict with the navy, and escorts through the English Channel with machine-gun mounts on gas carriers are not a symbol, but the direct consequence of that mechanism.
Meanwhile, new addresses for the industry keep surfacing. In April 2026, the IMO counted 529 vessels with false flags over the course of a year; nearly forty states discovered their names had been used without their knowledge; 356 of those vessels had no classification society at all. The International Convention on Conditions for Registration of Ships, requiring a “genuine link” between vessel and flag, was signed in 1986 and still has not entered into force—forty years have passed, and there is still no binding international law governing how a country must sell a flag. Under such conditions, the “country factory” is not an anomaly, but a structural product: demand for legality is infinite, while supply is constrained by nothing but the provider’s imagination—it can be printed.
An office in Chandigarh, a suite in Beverly Hills, a Singapore PTE, a Dubai residential tower—this is one and the same industry, and its documented biography is long: since 2014. On November 4, OFAC seized neither dollar assets nor oil—it seized a legend. Tomorrow, that legend will have a new domain and a new sign: the industry is as resilient as legality itself—a product forever.
Legal precision: OFAC designations are sanctions assertions by the U.S. Treasury, not verdicts of an American or any other court. All the “operations” described involving the Chandigarh network are an account of the Treasury’s official version; the releases do not provide responses from the parties concerned, and the accuracy of their public position has not been verified.
Sources: US Department of the Treasury, “Operation Economic Outcast Targets Global Maritime Fraud Network Supporting Iranian Regime” (press release sb0681), November 4, 2026; OFAC Alert “Iranian Shadow Fleet Reliance on False Flags for Sanctions Evasion,” November 4, 2026 (PDF); U.S. Virtual Embassy Iran, “U.S. Sanctions Fraudulent Ship Registries and Aviation Support for Iranian Regime,” November 2026; The Maritime Executive, “US Sanctions False-Flag Network Run from India Used for Iranian Shipping,” November 2026; gCaptain, “US Targets Fraudulent Ship Registries Used by Iran's Shadow Fleet,” November 2026; Lloyd's List, “US sanctions alleged architect of fake flag network supporting Iran shadow fleet,” November 2026; Follow the Money, “Hundreds of shadow fleet ships sail under a false flag. The West is coming for them — but is it fast enough?”, February 12, 2026; Follow the Money, “Sanctioned tankers buy fake flags: Sint Maarten” (investigation into MSTA); United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, 1982), Articles 90–94, 110; IMO GISIS and false-flag lists; the column’s pre-dawn briefing for November 6, 2026, including data on the changing false-flag share of shadow-fleet oil exports.