Another North Korean ship sinks, this time off the Chinese coast

In an effort to hide their sanctions violations from the prying eyes of the U.N. Panel of Experts — and from Leo Byrne and the sharp-eyed investigators at C4ADS — North Korean ships have taken to turning off the transponders and navigational devices that allow others to know where they are. Now that I’ve explained the advantages of that, let’s talk about one big possible disadvantage: other ships might crash into you and sink you.

That’s the best explanation I can piece together from what Leo Byrne could piece together from the what Chinese Maritime Ministry is saying about the sinking of the M/V Kum San off the Chinese port of Lianyungang, where it had been “hovering,” in standard North Korean fashion, until a Chinese oil tanker came along. Although the report says the Kum San struck the tanker, the report also says that the tanker was undamaged and went along its way, while the Kum San (apparently fully loaded) went to the bottom.

As with the January sinking of the M/V Chong Gen off Japan, all the crew were rescued. The Chong Gen was another North Korean general cargo vessel that sank in the Tsushima Strait with a cargo of rice, for reasons that were never fully explained, but might also have been due to a navigational failure given its proximity to the rocky Japanese coastline.

The Kum San had been flying the flag of Sierra Leone until recently, when it reflagged as North Korean. Its IMO does not appear in the Treasury Department’s SDN List, so it was not directly linked to smuggling. Typical of a North Korean ship, however, its owner is a company with just one ship, which is a tactic North Korea uses to obscure the true ownership of its vessels.

According to Byrne, North Korea recently began to consolidate the ownership of its shipping, and specifically its tanker fleet, as a result of the difficulty it is facing in registering its ships abroad under flags of convenience. A mass re-registration to Tanzania had become an embarrassment for the Tanzanian government. Byrne later discovered a similar North Korean effort to re-register ships under the Fijian flag, but the Fijian police soon began to investigate the practice.

The U.N. also recently banned other states from insuring North Korean vessels, so in theory, Pyongyang’s state insurance company (which was recently designated by the U.S. Treasury Department) will eat the entire cost of the loss. 

More posts on North Korean shipping here.