Oil Smuggling Ring Busted!
calendar_monthNovember 01, 2011
Anyone driving a car in Egypt might have heard a sentence at the gas stations lately: “Sorry we are out of petrol, please come back tomorrow.” Currently cities all over Egypt are facing serious problems because of oil shortage. But why? In mid-October we received a report from one of our valuable members about two boats located close to Zabargad Island in the southern Egyptian Red Sea: a big container ship and a fishing boat. They could not exactly see what was going on between the two boats but found the behaviour of the crews exceptionally strange. Acting hectically and even covering the boat names once they realised that pictures of them were taken, both boats departed shortly after our member arrived. We received the pictures and forwarded them to the authorities. Now an oil-smuggling ring involving many boats, including the two taken the pictures of, is under investigation. In Egypt oil is subsidised by the government making it very cheap compared to the neighbouring countries, a disparity that made oil smuggling growing in popularity in the country lately, leading to the establishment of a black market to export and sell oil to neighbours, Sudan for instance. Most of the times this is organised by waterway involving a bigger “mother-boat” which collects oil from multiple smaller boats and then ships it to other countries. Because of incidents like this one it is important that you keep on informing us whenever you witness something unusual or any violations out at sea! We would like to thank the member who reported this incident: thanks to you it was possible to catch the violators and stop this ring from operating in the future. This was an honorable behavior indeed and should be adopted by everyone else out at sea!
