Indian Register boss wants dark fleet ships allowed into class

Allow class to raise safety bar on sanctioned tankers before serious incident, argues Arun Sharma

The executive chairman of the Indian Register of Shipping (IRClass), has urged sanctions bodies to let classification societies help blacklisted vessels maintain safety standards.

Arun Sharma believes that sanctions regimes should relax rules that have effectively cut dark fleet vessels out of key safety checks, increasing the risk of disaster.

“Why do the sanctioning authorities say that you cannot class a sanctioned vessel?” he asked.

“And I’ve been told, ‘Please don’t take any sanctioned vessel into your class’.

“If a sanctioned vessel has a good flag and an IACS classification society ... I think that would only make the fleet, sanctioned or not sanctioned, safer and definitely take away any chance of disaster.”

The register benefited at the start of the Ukraine war when other members of the International Association of Classification Societies threw out Russia-linked tonnage, such as Sovcomflot tankers, which went to its class after being sold to Middle East owners.

But as sanctions tightened over the provision of services to individual ships, Sharma said IRClass lost almost 10m of its 25m registered gross tonnage.

That tonnage has now gone, he said, and is either registered with substandard assurance bodies or sailing without any safety regime at all.

Although IRClass lost about 40% of its registered fleet in terms of gross tonnage, Sharma said it has largely returned to that size, “minus a million or two tonnes”.

Its fleet is more international now, evenly split between India-flagged vessels and non-Indian, whereas before the sanctions, it was nearly 90% domestic.

Its fleet remains one of the smaller of the IACS members, and according to Sharma, the average ship age is about 16 years, making it also one of the older.