Guyana's Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation, Deodat Indar, urged Caribbean governments on Monday to join forces against "dark fleet" shipping, telling a regional maritime conference that falsified registrations let criminal operators sail under Caribbean flags. He stressed that the problem is too big for any one nation to tackle alone.

Mr Indar was speaking at the opening of the Caribbean Shipping Association's 56th Annual General Meeting, Conference and Exhibition, held at the Guyana Marriott Hotel in Georgetown. He addressed more than 450 maritime stakeholders, policymakers and industry executives, and President Irfaan Ali also spoke at the ceremony.The four-day conference, held under the theme "Building a More Connected, Resilient and Competitive Caribbean," concludes on 28 October.

The minister said criminal operators use fake registrations to allow vessels to sail under the flags of countries where they are not officially registered. He added that ships using these registrations have transported sanctioned oil, moved weapons and smuggled people. To show how far the fraud extends, he described an operator who registered vessels to a fictitious flag state based on a tiny uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Mr Indar said he had witnessed the issue firsthand alongside Stephen Thomas, director general of Guyana’s Maritime Administration Department (MARAD), adding that Guyana had also fallen victim to the practice.

The damage reaches beyond the states whose flags are copied, he said. Shipping lines, insurers and flag-state operations carry part of the cost, and a false registration can harm the standing of a national maritime administration. "If we don't work together, [we] simply can't stamp it out," he told delegates.

Guyana runs a closed ship registry. Only vessels owned by Guyanese nationals, residents, citizens of Caribbean Community states or companies incorporated under Guyanese law may fly its flag. MARAD said it had been identifying fraudulent claims of Guyanese registration since 2021 and sharing information on fake registrations with UN member states and international organisations through Guyana’s foreign affairs ministry and its own officials. The agency added that Panama and other countries in the region had also been targeted by the same scheme.  It also notes that the International Maritime Organization publishes a list of ships falsely flying the flags of member states.

The latest case involving Guyana’s flag occurred in April, when US forces seized the tanker Majestic X in the Indian Ocean as it was transporting Iranian oil. The US Treasury had sanctioned the vessel in 2024 under the name PHONIX for smuggling Iranian crude. Ship-tracking data reported by the Associated Press indicated that the vessel was heading to Zhoushan, China. MARAD said the ship is not registered in Guyana, that there is no record of the vessel or its name in the national registry, and that its IMO number remains tied to PHONIX in international databases. It added that none of the purported owners meets the criteria for Guyanese registration. US forces had been intercepting vessels linked to Iranian oil since Washington tightened restrictions on shipping associated with Iranian ports on 13 April. In December, they seized another vessel falsely flying the Guyanese flag.

Mr Indar urged Caribbean governments to coordinate their responses. The reports of his remarks did not set out specific enforcement measures, such as shared databases or common reporting rules. The conference is scheduled to run in Georgetown until Wednesday.

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