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Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine
- f137 1y agoI'm doubly baffled by this story. First, when I buy mandatory car insurance, police can check its validity in seconds. I'd expect international shipping to be at least at that level of strictness. Second, how insurance can help avoid sanctions? The enforcement should look at the goods source and destination, not on who insured them, right?
- SanjayMehta 1y ago[flagged]
- newyankee 1y agoAnything not validated by NATO/ USA is fake, rest of the world should adhere to their terms and definitions as the high seas are owned by them
- throwawaysleep 1y agoThey were not truly insured.
- polotics 1y agoDefinitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.
- vintermann 1y agoHow reliable is liability insurance for that sort of thing, generally speaking?
- ceejayoz 1y agoQuite. The real insurers are large, old, and have long made a name for themselves in this regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London
- SanjayMehta 1y agoSo existing legacy monopolies are real and all newcomers are fake. Got it.
- ceejayoz 1y agoNah. The smaller new ones reinsure via folks like Lloyds. It’s quite complex. The company in this article could have done that, but they forged documents to avoid it. They had no intention of covering accidents - it was just plain fake to get these ships into ports.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway". If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)
- cenamus 1y agoYou can literally press on it in the article and a definition pops up.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoI didn’t see any article. I saw a propaganda piece.
- jplrssn 1y ago> What is “fake insurance?” Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- svota 1y agoI feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoSanctioned by what international legal body?
- jimnotgym 1y agoThis is how we will lose this war. 'Everyone knows it is fake', probably the authorities too. But dealing with it in modern bureaucracy will take years, by which time another fake insurer is up and running.
- throw83939449 1y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 1y agoIt’s important to follow due process. We need more checks and balances, not fewer. Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly. We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
- diggan 1y ago> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly. Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
- renewiltord 1y agoHaha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.
- Y-bar 1y agoBoth Norway and Sweden have Lay Judges in the lower courts (which is little more than voluntary juries): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judge
- iosua2015 1y ago[flagged]
- hn_throw_250910 1y ago[flagged]
- p0wn 1y ago[flagged]
- Ozarkian 1y agoThe Broken Window Fallacy strikes again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- spiderice 1y agoTL;DR - If you spend money to fix a broken window, you don't spend that money to replace your shoes. Thanks, I hadn't heard of that parable before
- diggan 1y agoI hope you haven't extended that thinking-exercise to murders and more.
- truffet 1y ago[flagged]
- koakuma-chan 1y ago[flagged]
- Simulacra 1y agoFor some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.
- Noumenon72 1y agoThe "hate crime" thing is really imprecise use of language.
- andix 1y agoIt’s crazy how modern and complex company structures became impossible to govern. There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.
- NoahZuniga 1y agoThat's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.
- mandevil 1y agoWhich Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult. Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.
- csomar 1y agoWe have the tech to solve most of this (digital signatures, digitally signed public DBs -aka Blockchain) but the state bureaucracy apparatus can't figure that out for various reasons.
- NoahZuniga 1y agoActually a transparency log is a better system for a digitally signed public DB than a Blockchain, but yes the technology exists.
- xorcist 1y agoIs sending a plausible looking letter really all that's required? Does nobody ever call back to the Insurance Association of Norway (whatever they may be called) and check references? I mean, we check job seeker's references regularly.
- loeg 1y agoThe URL and HTML title element have the current HN title, "Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine." But FWIW, the Open Graph title meta element is "NRK reveals: Russian used Norwegian company to fool the West."
- e12e 1y agoNRK is very aggressive on a/b testing headlines - presumably optimizing for click through rates. Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.
- dmix 1y agoI used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market organize crime business. Military action is appearing more preferable to that. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o > In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas. > Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). > The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states. Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid
- beauzero 1y agoThe only other options are psychological or kinetic.
- mindslight 1y agoWhy not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine. (I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
- jltsiren 1y agoEurope kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough. Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Now it's mostly Hungary and Slovakia buying Russian energy, as well as some LNG imports. Those two countries are not too keen on sanctioning Russia, especially in ways that would hurt their economy. Any attempts to impose tariffs on energy imports from Russia would have led to a major internal crisis in the EU.
- victor22 1y ago"All ships must have insurance". Says fucking who?
- dilyevsky 1y agoPort operators