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THE MAN FROM MONGOLIA
SINGAPORE, FEBRUARY 2016
The Thunder’s journey was concealed by layer upon layer of lies and conspiracy. The ship was assisted and protected by anonymous agents, insurance companies, banks, corrupt servants and flag states that wanted their cut of the poaching revenues. Four of “The Bandit 6” sailed under the red and blue flag of Mongolia, the most unlikely shipping nation of them all.
“The Thunder became a huge problem,” says Tamir Lkhagvademberel, the director of the Mongolia Ship Registry.
We meet at a luxury restaurant in Singapore. The director is a husky and smiling middle-aged man incessantly fingering his gold-plated phone. He has five employees with him who listen to the conversation in silence. They were the ones who were going to punish the Thunder’s owner and officers if they broke the law or investigate the ship if it should get into an accident. Mongolia’s Navy consists of a tugboat on a lake in the north-western part of the country. It is manned by a crew of seven, only one of whom can swim.
“We have a bad reputation. That is something we are working hard to get rid of, but it is difficult to be removed from the black list. It will take us at least three years,” the director says between mouthfuls of lamb shank.
For ship owners there are a number of good reasons to sail under flags of convenience like the Mongolian. It is cheap, the ship owners are spared the annoyance of public regulations, can hire inexpensive and non-union labour and avoid taxes and cumbersome environmental and safety regulations. And they don’t ask owners hiding behind shell companies in tax havens any intrusive questions.
For somebody who runs a business which for years has been accused of hiding criminals, Tamir Lkhagvademberel seems surprisingly straightforward and naive – like his own path to the top of the Mongolian shipping industry.
In the winter of 2008 he flew from Ulan Bator to Berlin and from there on to Oslo. He didn’t know much about the Norwegian capital, but managed to find his way to the university, where he presented his wish to become a student. Preferably within the tourism and travel industry, he said.
The only documents he had with him were a diploma from a hotel management vocational school in Singapore and a tourist visa. After having received a polite rejection and advice to apply through ordinary channels, he travelled on to Sweden and the University of Uppsala. There too his attempts at acquiring acceptance as a student were unsuccessful.
Back in Mongolia he gave up on his dreams of higher education and found a job in the Ministry of Transport, where eventually he was appointed ship’s registrar at the Mongolia Ship Registry – the ship registry of a country located 1,300 kilometres from the closest port. The registry was the idea of Mongolia’s Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar and was to give its clients “excellence in registry and marine services”. What he did was to rent out Mongolia’s sovereignty to a private company, allegedly to procure revenues for the country’s treasury. He appointed his daughter as head of the office. Since few ship owners wanted to travel to the edge of the Gobi Desert to register their ships, the Mongolian ship registry was based in Singapore.
When Tamir Lkhagvademberel arrived at the ship registry’s austere offices in Singapore’s Chinatown, one of his first tasks was to register the fishing vessel the Kuko. In the registration papers, the old Vesturvon has undergone an impossible transformation: the ship was no longer built in Ulsteinvik in Norway in 1969, but rather in northern Spain 20 years later. On paper the hull is two metres shorter and five tons heavier. While the ship is registered in Mongolia, it is also listed in the Nigerian ships register under the more well-known name of the Thunder. The ship owner in Galicia had secured two sets of papers. For him it was a perfect system, while for the authorities who were trying to follow the ship’s pillaging missions in Antarctica, it was a nightmare.
Tamir Lkhagvademberel has no reasonable explanation for how so much could go wrong at the same time.
From the ministry in Ulan Bator, he has been told to use the meeting to create a better impression of the ship registry. A few years ago the registry’s director was caught cheating at a casino in Florida. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The country was accused of having registered anything that would float at a low cost. Mongolia-registered ships were constantly being seized or were mixed up in life-threatening or fatal accidents.
Before Mongolia started selling its flag, the ships register of Cambodia was the preferred banner of international criminals. The register was owned by the private company Sovereign Ventures, which had close ties with North Korea. After several episodes involving ships smuggling narcotics and weapons, Cambodia was forced to shut down its register. Sovereign Ventures bought its way into the Mongolia registry instead, which was quickly suspected of hiding North Korean and Iranian ships in violation of the international sanctions regime. Before long the Mongolian shipping escapade came to be viewed as a serious security threat.
“Mongolia appears to have no problem renting out its flag to weapons proliferators, criminals and other shady figures who endanger the security of the United States and its allies,” Director Peter Pham wrote in an analysis for the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs.1
“We had no experience with shipping; this was a first step towards the maritime industry. Some of the ships we registered became a headache for us. The USA and NATO pressured us to get rid of the North Korean ships and we also threw out agents who worked with blacklisted ships. We had to do something about our reputation,” Tamir Lkhagvademberel says.
The pirate vessels’ owners paid USD 3,000 to sail under the Mongolian flag. Nonetheless, the registry’s sales volume did not exceed 1 million dollars in 2015, according to Lkhagvademberel. That is barely enough for payroll, rent and living expenses in one of the most expensive cities in the world. If they are not earning money on it, why does Mongolia have a ship registry?
“Mongolia wants to become a shipping nation. We hope that more Mongolians will purchase their own ships in the course of the next few years,” is Lkhagvademberel’s attempted explanation.
Under pressure from Australia, Lkhagvademberel removed the Thunder and the other fishing vessels from its registry.
The ship registry’s financial director, the company’s only woman, is explicitly sceptical about the meeting.
“Why are we actually sitting here and talking to you?” she asks.
Five silent men look up from their plates and wait for an answer.
We drive to the offices of the ship registry in Chinatown. At the office the director has an equestrian statue of Djengis Khan.
“We once had the largest fleet in the world,” he says.
Even by the loosest of definitions, it must be admitted that it has been a long time since Mongolia was a shipping superpower. In the thirteenth century the Mongolian fleet was wiped out by a typhoon in an attempt to invade Japan. More than 4,000 ships and 100,000 soldiers are said to have disappeared.
In Mongolia the Thunder operated with three different identities. The ship was registered under the name the Wuhan No. 4 in July 2012. According to Lkhagvademberel, the registration of the Wuhan was made possible by a disloyal servant at the registry, who gave the Thunder’s owner what he needed in the way of papers, stamps and signatures without registering the ship in the official registry. What is odd about the ship’s certificates that Lkhagvademberel gives us as documentation for the Thunder’s two Mongolian identities – the Kuko and the Wuhan No. 4 – is that the most important defining feature on a ship – the so-called IMO number, which follows a ship from its christening to the scrap heap – is not included on either of them. What is even more curious is the Thunder’s third identity in Mongolia. On the Thunder’s final voyage the life rafts were marked with the name Ming No. 5, Ulaanbaator. There is no Ming No. 5 in the Mongolian registry, according to Lkhagvademberel.
The streets of Singapore are hot, clean and full of life. There are hundreds of ships in the harbour waiting to unload their containers. The shipping traffic is overwhelming and chaotic, but so non-bureaucratic that Singapore is constantly cited as one of the simplest places in the world to do business. The pirate fleet’s silent service providers are also hiding in the midst of this commercial whirlwind. Here they procure provisions, spare parts and fuel. Here they also find their ship agents.
In their explanations after the wreck of the Thunder, the officers stated that it was the Singapore company Thong Aik Marine Enterprises that represented the owner of the ship. Some also implied that the company owned the Thunder.
“No, no, no. We are not the owner of this vessel. If we were, we would not have been sitting here right now,” a harassed representative for the company shouts into the telephone.
Then he hangs up.