At the quayside in Buenos Aires, watching a boxship unload back in 1999, I asked the agent "who does this ship belong to?" He answered "I don't know". Notions of ownership in shipping have always been vague and fluid and this has been starkly exposed over the last couple of years by sanctions and the Hormuz conflict. On Lloyd's List at around the same time we used to refer to the 'confi' or the “Lloyd’s Confidential Index", a big hardback book that was supposed to list “managing owners”, though it was never clear if the entries were correct and updated and I was told to not admit that I had referenced it, so I stopped using it.
Is a ship defined by its flag? Its cargo? Its management? Or the shareholders behind the company that purchased it, or financed it i.e. the bank? To a large extent this depends who is asking: the underwriter, the port state control inspector, the sanctions official. If you think you own your house, try defaulting on your mortgage payments; for ships, the loan is often the basis for an arrest.
I'm therefore confused when I see reports like those in Bloomberg today that point to a plan by Iran and Oman to ban "US, Israeli" ships from the strait. Are they putting these ships through some kind of algorithm to see if they are worth attacking, or charging? A whole compliance industry has burgeoned around questions of ownership. Do Marshalls Islands-flagged vessels and Liberia-flagged vessels count as "controlled" by the US -- this is what the Chinese believed during the sanctions tit-for-tat of last year? Conversely, the US considered Hong Kong-flagged ships to be Chinese-controlled. But flag status alone is clearly not enough: the MSC Aries was Madeira-flagged but seized anyway by Iran on Tehran's claim that it was linked to Isreal via ownership. Portugal summoned the Iranian ambassador but got nowhere.
This fluid ownership structure is not universal; big shipping groups list their vessels; some are traded companies. But it is nevertheless commonplace and the opaqueness often suits differing interests. For bureaucrats, like those here in Brussels, this has been a constant headache, to the point where ships are often tracked by their management company or certificate holder rather than strict ownership. In the past, the real owner of a vessel often only emerged when she went down, causing pollution.
I could go on: just look at all the vessels switching back to the Russian registry to avoid being boarded and arrested on grounds of statelessness. Are these vessels Russian-owned? Or just Russian-controlled? Will this focus on targeting "linked" vessels force ownership to become even more obscure? Or will states come forward and claim vessels to be under their protection, a form of tutelage rather than ownership? Maybe there'll have to be "tutelage" entry in the Equasis database...