International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2018/Spring 2019 | Page 64

The Toxicity of Maritime Overcapacity
a hybrid maritime services company, produce a fake invoice at a lower price, and
then carry out unauthorized degassing. If this fraudulent operation takes place in a
country that has no maritime surveillance, there is almost no risk for the budding
criminal entrepreneur.
Third, the global administrative context allows and facilitates opacity. This
context includes matters of flag registration, of course, but this is not all. The
Lloyd’s Register provides for up to six types of relationships of responsibility to
a ship (beneficial owner, commercial operator, designated beneficiary, technical
manager, third-party operator, nominal beneficiary). This range of mechanisms,
like nesting dolls, dilutes responsibility and traceability in such a way that these
“responsible” operators of a ship could just as easily be revealed to be a company
established in a tax haven, acting for the real owner, and only operating one ship.
The single-ship shell company technique is a classic. It allows the connection between
the real owner and the ship to be severed if any regulatory concerns are
raised while keeping the rest of the fleet from being immobilized. There are countless
cases of crews going unpaid or being prisoner to this type of ship.
Fourth, economic deterioration lowers the price of entry into the activity,
allowing criminal actors and maritime opportunists to gain a foothold. Although
they often lack competency, they are true professionals in crime, and focus on
purchasing second, third, or fourth-hand ships. The “price of entry” is meant here
as both the capital necessary for acquiring a means of shipping and as the ability
to operate it in complete security. But for these criminal actors, it is not just about
operating the vessel they own. They are also able to invest in service operations
related to ships, ports, or maritime investment: loaders, crew suppliers, equipment
suppliers, consigners, agents, cleaners, tax lawyers, or maritime classification companies.
They create a criminal microcosm that facilitates the maritime transit of
illegal freight, dangerous cargo, and traffic that is not safe from the risks of the
sea, does not conform to human safety standards, and is harmful to seashore and
marine environments. These actors are criminals by nature, or they corrupt legal
actors by provoking hybrid white-collar crime.
What moderates these four factors that lead to crime is on the one hand
the maritime sector’s ability to exchange tools with other economic sectors (which
is very limited as its tools are specific to it) and on the other hand the level of
concentration of the activity (a disparate sector with small, weak actors is more
susceptible to the mechanisms listed above than a concentrated, oligopolistic sector).
Together, these four factors primarily reflect the issue of maritime capitalism
and more specifically its capitalistic structure (the ability to organize and structure
capital, the ability to generate and regenerate it, and the ability to organize actors
along with their degree of concentration).
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