Malta remains on shipping blacklist, with slight improvement in position

Malta remains on the official annual blacklist of substandard ships drawn up by the Paris Memorandum of Understanding and, like last year, ships registered with its flag are classified as posing a medium risk within this category.

Albania tops the blacklist in a report published a few days ago by the Paris MOU, followed by Bolivia, Sao Tome and Principe, Tonga and Lebanon.

The Paris MOU is made up of 19 maritime administrations which cover the waters of the European coastal states and the North Atlantic basin from North America to Europe.

Malta comes 22nd on the blacklist, followed by the slightly better rated India, Bulgaria, Tunisia and Cyprus. The blacklist is followed by a grey list of 29 countries, led by Croatia (worst position on the grey list) and a white list with another 26 countries.

There are about 3,000 vessels on the Maltese register, half of which are small boats and pleasure craft. But the rest, comprising most of the 30 million shipping tons registered, are tankers, bulk carriers, chemical carriers, merchant ships, container ships, and cruise liners.

The Maltese register ranks fifth worldwide and second in Europe in terms of size.

On the Paris blacklist, ships from 15 flag states are classified as being "very high risk", a further three states are "high risk", two are classified as "medium to high risk" and six "medium risk".

A year ago, Malta topped the "medium risk" category; it has now improved one place in the medium risk category and three places from the blacklist overall.

The UK, followed by Sweden, Finland, the Isle of Man and Germany, is in the best position on the white list.

The report, which covers inspections on ships carried out between 2000 and 2002, shows that only Panamanian-registered ships underwent more inspections than Maltese (5,213, against Malta's 5,000).

A total 481 of the ships inspected were detained and 380 of these came from countries lying in the black to grey limit.

In its annual report, the Paris MOU said that a minority of rogue ship owners were still managing to escape the net of control measures and continued to give the shipping industry a bad name.

Old ships registered under "fly-by-night" flags, surveyed by shady classification societies, manned by poorly certified seafarers and operated in defiance of all safety management principles posed an unacceptable risk to human life and the environment.

Alan Cubbin, chairman of the Port State Control Committee, said:

"With the introduction of more selective targeting, expanded inspections and new banning provisions, the Paris MOU is moving towards a zero-tolerance policy".

The report said that in the future, shipowners could find that it was more profitable to operate under quality flags or have their ships scrapped, than to be on the blacklist.

It pointed out that several flags on the blacklist had now taken positive measures to improve their record.

The report said that last year, 78 per cent of the class-related detentions took place on ships flying a flag on the blacklist.

And in spite of some initial criticism of this observation, a few more prominent societies were now reconsidering their association with these flags.

The total number of inspections increased substantially in 2002 and was 5.8 per cent higher than the previous year.

The most positive trend could be observed in detentions which decreased for the second year in a row and now constituted 7.98 per cent of total inspections. 67 per cent of detentions took place on ships flying a blacklisted flag.

Ships older than 15 years showed 12 times as many non-conformities as ships less than five years old.