Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a bill regulating bank rehabilitations in its final reading Tuesday, May 26. Before the second reading, an amendment was added, establishing a special registration procedure for sea vessels and allowing for restriction of access to ownership information, according to a report by the TriTrace Investigations project.
The bill was submitted to the State Duma in mid-January, but the vessel registration amendment was not added until the second reading on May 21.
The measure would amend Russia’s law on countering “unfriendly actions” on the part of the U.S. and other states, creating a “special” state registration procedure for seagoing, river, and mixed river-sea vessels.
Some previously mandatory requirements would no longer apply to those vessels, including rules on documentation, crew hiring, coastal shipping, and access to data on the legal entities that own them.
TriTrace Investigations said the amendments appear intended to hide information about Russia’s “shadow fleet,” including the vessels’ owners and beneficiaries. The project said the changes would complicate the work of sanctions authorities and private Russian entities dealing with such vessels due to the risk of secondary sanctions.
Although much of the “shadow fleet” used to transport oil in circumvention of sanctions is registered in other jurisdictions, some vessels still sail under the Russian flag.
In January, the sanctioned tanker Progress, used to transport Russian oil, lost control in the Mediterranean. Around the same time, the tanker Bella 1, which had tried to evade the U.S. Coast Guard in the Atlantic, changed its registration to Russia. The move did not help: the vessel, later renamed Marinera, was seized.
