Iran's largest sanctions-evasion network took its tankers through 21 European port inspections between 2022 and 2025, and on the day of each call neither the ship nor its recorded manager was on any list. An analysis of Paris MoU and registry records in Maritime Watch's Mariel database found the fleet rotating managers faster than the designation regimes could name them: each time a management company was sanctioned, the ships had already moved to the next one. Four of the five managers on the inspection reports are now designated in Washington, Brussels or London, and all seventeen ships are listed.
A step behind?
The port state control record also connected the trading groups of sanctioned Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, SUEK and EuroChem, to ships calling at EU ports as late as June 2025. The EU has listed the man, and its own General Court has found he "continues to control" the groups and still benefits from the wealth he transferred to his wife Aleksandra, who has been listed since June 2022. But the companies themselves are not sanctioned, and the charters remain lawful.
Red Sea bind
Italy's defence minister told a forum in La Spezia on 17 September that Rome would no longer wait for Aspides, the EU's own naval mission, to decide whether ships can pass, and would prepare to escort its own merchant vessels through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. On the record to Reuters he added that only Italy and Greece are really carrying the operation. Days later the shortfall was acknowledged at the top: on 21 September the EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said Aspides needs at least ten warships and has fewer than that now, "even more grave right now". Maritime Watch reported the operation going to sea in 2024 as a four-frigate force, which EC sources admitted was not much. European navies were stretched back then, and are arguably even more stretched now.
Another slow update?
The EC's consolidated financial-sanctions list, the reference compliance teams can screen against, does not seem to have been updated since 5 August, and designations made by a June regulation do not appear on it. More on that to come (I've asked the EC to check it out).
The two timetables
Away from enforcement, the EU tightened its carbon-price defences. Member State representatives voted on 16 September to add Abu Qir and Damietta to the blacklist of transhipment ports where a container-ship call does not count under the emissions trading system, doubling a list that held only Tanger Med and East Port Said and closing more of the room ships have to dodge the price by stopping just outside the bloc. The July revision would go further, lowering the transhipment threshold and adding any deep-water box port within 150 nautical miles of an EU port. The co-legislators aim to finish the ETS revision by December, the very fortnight the IMO decides whether to adopt or shelve its Net-Zero Framework. Protection against paying twice, under Brussels and under any global measure, still rests on a review clause a Commission-commissioned study released on 14 September warned could leave the carbon market's integrity exposed.
And a word from us
Maritime Watch has reported EU maritime regulatory affairs from Brussels since 2010; the archive runs to more than five thousand articles. This week's sanctions investigations were built on the Mariel database, Maritime Watch's own enforcement-records database. There is much more on maritimewatch.eu. Free trials on request: editor@maritimewatch.eu.