The hook came from an evening briefing: detentions and arrests cut the number of shadow tankers flying false flags from a peak of 101 in October 2025 to 45 by the end of June 2026, while Russia over the same period signed 107 vessels to its own flag, increasing the registry by 36% — from 280 to 382. You want to read this as a story about Moscow hiding. But in this story, everyone was trying to hide — and all for money.
Because the "shadow fleet" isn't lawlessness; it's a purchase. A vessel has to be registered somewhere, and the country registering it takes a fee. This purchase isn't obvious right up until you read the price list: there are duties, an annual tonnage tax, and a separate line item for post-detention inspections. A flag is a service with a rate card, and the whole current hunt for tankers is running off the price list.
The official document of the world's largest registry reads like a menu. Registration fee — $0.13 per registered ton plus $1,500 per vessel, but no more than $3,900. Administrative fee for the very fact of entry into the registry — $6,500. Then annually: a tonnage tax of $0.113322 per ton plus $4,327, and for smaller vessels — no less than $929.24.
A separate line item is the contribution for the maritime inspection program, from $2,000 to $2,900, and $2,750 for an unscheduled inspection after a vessel is detained in a foreign port. A vessel caught by port state control pays its flag once more — this time for sorting out what happened.
This is the business model, and it is described in plain text in a study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization: the revenues of an open registry are tonnage fees and registration duties, licensing deductions, and savings from outsourcing administrative functions. It also says what is usually omitted in the news: some registries operate as commercial enterprises and can be bought and sold like any other business. And right after — a phrase that explains the whole plot: making a profit does not always mean investing in an effective oversight system.
Liberia runs the world's largest registry, and it doesn't run it from Monrovia. Since 1999, the registry has been managed by LISCR — a company incorporated in Delaware, with an office in Virginia, and under Liberian law, its investors can only be US citizens. The address listed in the current fee circular is 22980 Indian Creek Drive, Dulles, Virginia. A 2009 US cable from Monrovia describes how the company renegotiated its contract for ten years, insisting that all fees go directly to the country's Central Bank, bypassing the Bureau of Maritime Affairs: the previous scheme allowed the Bureau to manage this money off-budget.
The Marshall Islands have the same setup with a different history. The registry is serviced by the private International Registries, headquartered in Reston, near Washington, with 28 offices worldwide. Its predecessor, Liberian Services Inc., opened in New York on February 4, 1949, and the first vessel entered into the Liberian registry on March 11, 1949, was the tanker World Peace — owned by the interests of Stavros Niarchos and chartered to Getty Oil. Edward Stettinius Jr., US Secretary of State and the first US Ambassador to the UN, came up with the whole scheme: watching how neutrality laws worked, he decided that after the war, an open registry for peacetime was needed, managed by a private company.
On June 8, 2026, Liberia became the first in history to cross the 300 million gross tons threshold, reaching 307.3 million, or roughly 17% of global tonnage. Over the past year, the registry grew by 9.3%, and the year before by 3.2%. Behind this is a more interesting figure: 28% of the global newbuild portfolio is registered under the Liberian flag. The registry is winning vessels right on the slipway.
At the same time, by number of vessels, Liberia concedes to Panama: 8,540 versus about 5,000 hulls. Both figures are correct; they just answer different questions — tonnage measures volume, fleet lists count hulls. The three leading registries together hold about 45% of global capacity, and none of these three is a major shipowning nation. A separate independent sample using AIS data gives an even sharper picture: five open registries — Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, the Bahamas, and Malta — account for 17.7% of vessels, but 65.7% of deadweight in the observed fleet.
The doors at the big stalls closed quickly: according to analytics, Liberia and the Marshall Islands simply turned down this clientele, Barbados and Palau purged all sanctioned shadow vessels from their registries, and Panama cut their numbers by almost two-thirds since May 2025. Shipowners went downmarket, to small countries where registries are often outsourced to private companies.
The leader of this lower segment became the Comoros, followed by Gabon, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and at its peak — Benin, whose registry grew in 2025 by an estimated nearly 50,000%. Following this surge, Cameroon ended up as the world's second-largest registry for sanctioned shadow tankers: 13% of such vessels in 2026 broadcast the Cameroonian flag via AIS, and in total, over 120 sanctioned tankers out of roughly 180 were sailing under it.
This is exactly where the second, lesser-known half of the problem begins. Not all of these vessels were registered honestly: there are fake registries — private companies that issue certificates in the name of a state without asking it for permission. According to maritime analytics estimates, at least a dozen such registries are operating. More than half of the world's sanctioned tonnage sails under a false or entirely unknown flag.
First on the list of fakes is Guyana, followed by Malawi, Guinea, Curaçao, Benin, Eswatini, Mali, and Angola. After eight incidents, Malawi officially notified the IMO that it does not engage in international flagging at all. It also turned out that all Eswatini flags are fake: the country is not a member of the IMO and has no registry.
In April 2026, the International Maritime Organization identified 529 vessels with false flags over the year, with nearly 40 states discovering their flag had been used without their knowledge. 356 of these vessels have no classification society — meaning formally, no one verified their technical condition.
The second unresolved edge is Cameroon. In February 2026, its Ministry of Transport announced a suspension of registration for vessels operating outside Cameroonian waters, citing "several cases of fraudulent registrations"; the minister publicly blamed them on cyber fraud, which sounds like an admission of a hole in their own procedure. But as of that same week, over 180 tankers were sailing under the Cameroonian flag according to AIS data, and by spring, according to industry publication calculations, the country had struck off 36 vessels — yet 155 of the 165 remaining international vessels were still listed as sanctioned or shadow. How this happened if the registration was entirely suspended, the sources do not explain: likely, the suspension applied to new registrations, and the existing mass simply continued to sail. This is my guess, and it is unverified.
The answer devised was legally clever. Sanctions against the operator of the Gabon and Comoros registries are sanctions against the stall, not the buyer: the design of Intershipping Services LLC, a company operating out of a residential skyscraper in a Dubai suburb, officially listed as the "authorized representative of the Gabonese Maritime Administration worldwide." Through the owner's family ties and an Indian office, the same firm also handled Comoros affairs. In 2024, due to an influx of Russian tonnage, Gabon became the fastest-growing registry in the world, and before that, it was the flag of the Iranian tanker Pablo, which exploded off Malaysia in 2023. The Comoros, meanwhile, showed up on the Paris MoU blacklist, in the US Coast Guard's "high risk" list, and on the list of flags most frequently appearing in abandoned crew cases.
The effect was exactly the hardest to predict: when the buyer was stripped of a cheap stall, he went to the last one left — and that was the Russian flag. Of the 107 vessels added to the Russian registry from January 2025 to June 2026, 87% were already under sanctions at the moment of the flag change, and 56% had previously sailed under at least one false flag. Another 41 vessels that were in the Comoros registry at its peak, and 31 Gambian ones, were sailing under the Russian flag by June 2026.
The logic here is cynical but transparent: a vessel flying the flag of a country that does not recognize you is legally defenseless, it can be detained, and the West actively used this. A vessel flying the Russian flag cannot be detained without a direct conflict. In total, 213+ sanctioned tankers out of more than a thousand under Western sanctions are now sailing under the Russian flag, and the registry is growing, although additions are already tapering off: from a peak of 25 vessels in December 2025 to three in June 2026.
Here I also honestly admit to the dead end that the figures from two analytics firms drove me into. For CREA, at the end of June 2026, there are 382 vessels in the Russian registry in total, 107 added since January 2025, 12 left. For Windward, in the same September 2026: since November 2025, Moscow has transferred about 69 sanctioned tankers to its flag, and in total, there are more than 213 under the Russian flag. I cannot reconcile these numbers into a single picture: it seems they are counting different sets — "vessels in the registry in general" versus "sanctioned tankers with a confirmed transfer" — but the sources do not specify this, so any graph of "how many flags Russia stole" will depend on whose numbers you take.
It is not the flag that pays for the whole scheme, but the crew and the shore. According to ITF data, in 2025, 48 countries were listed as flags of convenience, and 14,407 of the federation's 15,663 active agreements hung on such vessels. One hundred and thirty inspectors in 109 ports across 55 countries conducted over nine thousand inspections over the year and recovered $45.2 million in unpaid wages — with the bulk of this sum, $31.8 million, returned on vessels that had no ITF agreement at all. This is not a safety report; it is a report on how much money was withheld from people who could not object.
Port state control, which is now catching shadow vessels, also emerged from a disaster. In 1978, the Liberian tanker Amoco Cadiz spilled off the coast of Brittany, and after that, fourteen European countries signed the Paris Memorandum, introducing inspections in ports. The meaning of the mechanism is unchanged: if the flag does not fulfill its duties, a foreign coastal service does it for them.
The honest answer to the question of why all this is possible is boring and lies in the 1986 Geneva document. The UN Convention on Conditions for Registration of Ships required a "genuine link" between the vessel and the flag state and set 40 signatories with a quarter of global tonnage as the threshold for entry into force. As of September 26, 2026, it has been signed by 14 states, with 15 parties, and it still has not entered into force. Moreover, the news in 2026 says in plain text: there is no binding international framework regulating ship registration today at all.
And in April 2026, the IMO adopted not a new treaty, but new recommendations — a set of practical measures for registries on verifying owners and oversight. Against the backdrop of 529 vessels with false flags, this looks like a warning to the seller, not a replacement for a law.