Ship-tracking services show that somewhere off Cyprus right now is a crude oil tanker called the Tour 2, signaling as flagged to Togo. All of which sounds pretty innocuous.
Or is it? Over the past year the Tour 2 has had two different names, sailed under at least four different flags — Malta, Bolivia, Sierra Leone and Togo — and according to the Equasis shipping database, it is now flagged to Iran. In recent weeks, before it began lingering off Cyprus, it sailed from Iran to the Syrian port of Tartous — . And though the ship itself is not on the U.S. sanctions list, some of its previous owners are. Actually, this ship was specifically identified in a report last June by the United Nations Panel of Experts on Iran sanctions, so UN member states would be aware of its connection to a UN-sanctioned shipping company. More on this scene in my article, “A Tale of Iran, Syria and a Busy Oil Tanker.”
So, are any of those UN member states going to do anything about this?
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