The shipping industry is crucial for global commerce, but much of the fishing and cargo shipping industries are extremely opaque and often characterized by lawlessness. “Some ships are stolen, renamed, retitled and resold. Some shippers flaunt regulations regarding pollution, dumping oil and toxins and garbage unseen,” Andrea Wrage, the president of TRACE, an anti-bribery organization, wrote in a Forbes op-ed recently.
“The underlying issue, predictably, is accountability, and the first barrier is that ownership can be concealed.” Many upstanding companies in the shipping industry want to see improvements in transparency and hope to distance themselves from the “dirty bottom half” of the industry. TRACE has sought to improve accountability in shipping by partnering with RightShip, a vessel vetting organization, to develop an antibribery certification program for ship-owners that, among other things, requires participants to declare the identity of ships’ beneficial owners.
Click here to read the op-ed.
(The Sentry, an initiative of the Enough Project, seeks to disrupt and ultimately dismantle the networks of perpetrators, facilitators, and enablers who fund and profit from Africa’s deadliest conflicts.)