Despite falling under more stringent ship-inspection rules from January, Malta is confident it will not lose many vessels from its register, the second largest in the EU and a lucrative source of business for local firms.

At the beginning of the year, EU member states brought into force new rules known as the New Inspection Regime (NIR), which is similar to that used by the United States. Instead of targeting the inspection of 25 per cent of ships calling at each member state, which was the case in the past, member states have entered a shared commitment to inspect every single ship visiting ports and anchorages in the EU.

“The previous regime on port state control allowed a level of flexibility in selecting ships for inspections, while the new system legally binds all EU member states to cyclically inspect all the ships visiting the ports and anchorage areas in the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) region,” a spokesman for the Transport Ministry said.

The new regime stipulates that all ships that have not been subject to a port state control inspection for 36 months would have to be inspected. Furthermore, inspection obligations now include anchorage areas.

Apart from training port state control officers, Malta is also required to have in place the necessary arrangements to facilitate the collection and reporting of ship arrival and departure information for port State control purposes.

“Through these new rules, Malta expects that more ships will be subject to inspection,” the spokesman said. Asked whether the rules will have an impact on Malta’s shipping register, as many ship owners might prefer to re-flag their vessels under less stringent jurisdictions outside the EU, the spokesman said this should not be the case.

“As long as Malta maintains its position on the White List of the Paris MoU, the new inspection regime is expected to have limited flagging out repercussions,” he said.

Malta has been on the White List of the Paris MoU – an administrative understanding among member states – since 2004. The white, grey and black lists are compiled according to the detention rate of ports of flag states. Ships registered with flag states listed under the black and grey lists are prone to more inspections whereas the white list is a less stringent classification; ships under these flags expect to be visited for inspection much less frequently than others.