Government asks Spain, Portugal for clarification

The government has asked Spain and Portugal to state what criteria were applied in banning a Maltese-flagged vessel from their territorial waters last week.

Malta Maritime Authority chairman Marc Bonello said in an interview that similar requests would be made to the French government following a similar incident on Tuesday involving another vessel.

The Maltese-flagged tanker Moskovskiy Festival, which is classified by Lloyds Register, was last inspected in Spain and Russia in October and found to have no structural deficiencies. Yet it was forced off the Spanish and Portuguese coasts last week while the Enalios-Titan was forced off the French coast on Tuesday.

"There do not appear to be set criteria for these expulsions and the industry is in utter disarray. The Moskovskiy Festival was built in 1985 and can be in service up to 2011. It has never been detained, but within a month it became a vagabond ship.

"The irony is that Lloyds' List reported yesterday that yet another port state control inspection carried out on Saturday at Gibraltar again found no deficiencies on the vessel," Dr Bonello said.

"Spain, Portugal and France have set terrible precedents. We are seeking clarifications as to why the ship was expelled from their waters. I hope the EU takes hold of the situation before it develops into a free-for-all. If ships continue to be stopped without specific guidelines, there will be chaos."

Asked about criticism relating to the number of aging ships on the Malta register, Dr Bonello said the average age of the fleet was 18 years, the same as the EU average.

"In addition, some 80 per cent of Malta-flagged vessels are owned by EU member states. Malta and Cyprus have more tankers on their register while the shipping registers of EU countries have much less tonnage and fewer 'risky' ships.

"Being a bigger flag poses a bigger risk and having more ships increases the likelihood of accidents. Having a detention rate of 7.8 per cent with such a high level of risk is good going," Dr Bonello said.

However, he does not believe that Malta should stop offering a ship registering service simply because it receives criticism.

"That is what many critics would want. If we stop registering ships, someone else will do it and we cannot guarantee that they would do it with the same level of scrutiny.

"Malta depends on maritime trade and it is in our interests to operate as safely and economically as possible. We have been involved in maritime matters for thousands of years. The spin-offs generated by ship registrations are quite big," Dr Bonello said.

Malta inspects 21 per cent of individual ships that call, which is very close to the Paris MOU recommendation which states that 25 per cent of the ships making port should be inspected. France, for instance, inspects only nine per cent, Dr Bonello said.

The Paris MOU is an organisation consisting of 19 participating maritime administrations and covers the waters of the European coastal states and the North Atlantic basin from North America to Europe.

It aims at eliminating the operation of sub-standard ships through a harmonised system of port state control.

Dr Bonello said there were clear signs that the Maltese flag was discriminated against: "Some ship owners have complained to the MMA that they had been subjected to excessive inspections by overzealous inspectors in certain European ports. Maltese ships are inspected with more rigour and frequency than other flags.

"Malta sells its service within strict maritime safety parameters. Whenever we ask why Malta is still labelled as a flag of convenience we are told that this is because most of our tonnage is not owned by Maltese.

"But ship owners chose the Maltese flags because we offer good value for money. We offer a 24-hour service and ship owners have easy access to our technical people. We do not take illegitimate shortcuts but offer an efficient service without wasting time," Dr Bonello said.

The standards imposed by the MMA were quite tough, he said. A survey by a classification society has to be made each year for a ship to remain on the Maltese register.

"The MMA uses only first-class, world-renowned classification societies and does not accept certificates from other classification societies," Dr Bonello said.

Ships less than 15-years-old - the watershed between moderate age and old - have to undergo an annual survey, an intermediate inspection every two-and-a-half years and a drydock inspection every five years.

"But if one looks at the Marpol 13G convention and its appendices which determine the dates when ships should be phased out, it is clear that some ships can remain in service for 30 years. The MMA has imposed a condition upon itself not to accept ships that are over 25 years old and if a ship was on the register before it was 25, it would have to leave the register on reaching that age," Dr Bonello said.

To encourage younger ships, the MMA has devised a registration system based on a 15-year-old vessel and discounts are given to younger ships while older vessels have to pay more.

Dr Bonello said a large percentage of Paris MOU detentions concerned ships with low tonnage. Some 60 per cent of the ships detained are bulk carriers which carry dry cargo, such as wood, steel, molasses or salt.

"Currently, the MMA has a detention rate of 7.8 per cent. If we were to remove these ships from our register, the detention rate for the remaining types of ship would fall to just over three per cent, which is below the EU average detention rate," Dr Bonello said.

To address the issue, the MMA has also adjusted its tariff structure so that it is relatively more costly to register a small ship than a larger one.

"With the way the fee structure per ton is, a 1,000-ton vessel costs as much to register as a 5,000 ton," Dr Bonello said.

Dr Bonello also said all tankers built after 1992 were double hulled.

"Double hulled tankers are only better in a minor collision. When ships break up, it does not make a difference whether they are single or double hulled. A year after the Erika disaster, we were in Brest, close to the place where the Erika sank.

"An Italian-flagged, 11-year-old double hulled tanker carrying chemicals sank in the same spot. A French parliamentarian had the courage to ask whether people would now start insisting on triple hulled vessels.

"The Maltese register has 300 tankers of which some 225 were built before 1992 and are therefore single hulled. The average age of ships in the EU is 18 and they too have single hulled tankers on their registers. The issue was when to take them out of service.

"The original proposal was to phase them out by 2026. Malta pushed and supported the initiative to remove them by 2015. The IMO has given countries the option to extend the deadline by two years but Malta and Cyprus have declared that the phasing out should take place by 2015.

"If anyone wants to reopen a debate to phase out single hulled tankers before that date, we would be happy to join and support such an initiative. But everyone should be aware of the implications of such a decision.

"There may not be enough tankers to carry fuel oil as the shipbuilding industry will not be able to build the new tankers that would be needed in the required time.

"This implies that storage facilities on land would have to be bigger. This means there may be times when there is no fuel for power stations and people would have power cuts. In addition, investors who build tankers would want a return and the price of fuel would increase.

"Are we prepared to pay for such expenses? To put things in a better perspective, it is worth pointing out that 99.86 per cent of the oil transported over the sea reaches its destination. A few thousand tons of oil, sadly, leaves devastating effects, but even double hulled tankers do not guarantee that there will not be accidents. We need some cool-headed debate, not hysteria, to find the proper solutions," Dr Bonello said.

Dr Bonello said whenever there were accidents, there was rarely a single culprit. Very often, there were a number of factors.

"Many of the accidents we hear about take place in the Bay of Biscay, which is a treacherous stretch of sea. The latest tanker to sink there, the Prestige, had been plying those seas for five days seeking a port of refuge but was denied entry into any of the ports approached.

"Then when disaster struck and the ship broke up, it was the ship and flag that were blamed," Dr Bonello said.

The MMA has been stressing that the IMO should designate ports of refuge so that ships in difficulty would not be abandoned to their own devices. But as yet, the IMO has not done this, Dr Bonello said.