A “dark fleet” vessel, Liberty, carrying 130 000 tonnes of Venezuelan fuel oil and 31 crewmembers, ran aground on a rocky bottom after departing from Singapore earlier this month.
“Dark Fleet” tankers that carry oil from Russia, Venezuela and Iran pose a serious safety and pollution risk as their average age is high, especially in the Venezuelan and Iranian trades, where the average ship is 20 years old, the usual retirement point for these vessels.
The 23-year-old Liberty, a Cameroon-flagged Suezmax, called at the Russian tank farm at Ust-Luga in June, and then apparently spent August, September and October sailing in geometric circles off the Angolan coast.
This location has been previously identified with the Venezuelan "dark fleet" trade, in which vessels fake their location in Angola to hide their true operations in Latin America.
Liberty then sailed around the Cape of Good Hope before crossing the Indian Ocean, to arrive in Singapore on November 24 where she anchored north of Karimunbesar Island. On December 2, she sailed towards shore before running aground on a charted shoal in 11 metres of water, according to the vessel’s Automatic Identification System tracking.
Regional port authority KSOP Karimun reported that the grounding had occurred at about 11:00 local time.
A spokesperson for KSOP Karimun told local media that the shipowner would transfer some of the fuel oil to another vessel to reduce the vessel’s draught and improve the chance of refloating her, while the port authority had prepared an oil containment boom as a precautionary measure.
