Guyana is seeking an international arrest warrant for Suniel Kumar Sharma, an India-based businessman sanctioned by the United States over a network accused of falsely registering vessels under Guyana’s flag, including ships carrying Iranian oil.
Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar told Kiskadee Watch yesterdayon the sidelines of Parliament that the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) had filed a report with the Guyana Police Force and was seeking Interpol’s assistance. Guyana is also working with the U.S. State Department to pursue Sharma’s arrest.
“We are working actively to get an arrest warrant for this man,” Indar said. “We are not taking this thing lightly.”
The company initially approached Guyana with several proposals and signed a memorandum of understanding with the government. Indar said officials questioned the company’s legitimacy and terminated the agreement about two months after signing it. Guyana then informed the International Maritime Organization that it had severed ties with the company. Indar said MARAD would issue a statement on the matter.
“This company has been using [Guyana] illegally to flag ships that are moving Iranian oil,” Indar said. He said vessels involved also carried other sanctioned goods and that Guyana was cooperating with regional governments and external monitoring bodies.
Indar and Director General Thomas recently travelled to Antigua for a sanctions enforcement meeting, where they presented Guyana’s case. They met with U.S. Treasury officials who handle sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as well as companies involved in ship registries around the world.
Indar said the discussions covered how vessels in so-called shadow fleets use false flags, change flags while en route and switch off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals to avoid detection. MARAD has been supplying U.S. authorities with information on vessels that claimed to be registered in Guyana.
“I think that the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanction is fitting,” Indar said. “We support it because we are working with them.”
Indar alleged that Sharma had defrauded 18 countries, including Guyana, and had used the name of an uninhabited South Pacific island to flag vessels. He did not identify the island.
Guyana operates a closed ship registry administered by the government. Indar said there is no deputy registrar authorised to register vessels on the government’s behalf. He put the number of vessels operating in Guyana at about 556 and identified the MV Moti as the largest, naming BKMT as its owner.
Indar said Guyana does not register large tankers of the kind at issue in the sanctions case. Eligibility to register vessels under Guyana’s flag is limited to Guyanese nationals, residents, citizens of CARICOM states and companies established under Guyanese law.
OFAC sanctioned Sharma and his wife, Jaspreet Preeti Shahid, on November 4. The U.S. Treasury said the couple operated from Chandigarh, India, and ran a network that purported to offer ship registration and other maritime services on behalf of several jurisdictions. The network allegedly used an entity called the International Maritime Safety Agency of Guyana to falsely represent vessels as registered in Guyana. MARAD welcomed the sanctions in a November 5 statement.
U.S. forces seized the Majestic X in the Indian Ocean on April 22 while it was carrying Iranian oil. The tanker was falsely flying Guyana’s flag, and MARAD found no record of it in the national registry under either Majestic X or its former name, Phonix.
Accommodating
In a blistering letter in the November 7th edition of Kiskadee Watch
MP and Leader of the Forward Guyana Movement, Amanza Walton-Desir lambasted the government over its accommodating of Sharma despite what was known internationally about him.
“This Government did more than sign with Mr. Sharma. It rolled out the red carpet for him. On March 19, 2021, the state owned Guyana Chronicle published photographs of Mr. Sharma and the woman investigators have since identified as his wife, presented as Professor Jaspreet Kaur, with the Minister of Public Works, Bishop Juan Edghill, the then Minister within the Ministry of Public Works, Deodat Indar, and Director General Thomas. The report announced a joint venture promising more than US$35 million in investment, a marine training institute, a shipyard and dry dock, one hundred
scholarships and over six hundred jobs for Guyanese. It stated that Minister Edghill, Minister Indar, Director General Thomas and the Chief Executive Officer of GO Invest, Dr. Peter Ramsaroop, had all committed to working with the venture, and that worldwide vessel registrations would be done through the company”, Walton-Desir said.
She added: “Another contradiction concerns the claim that the arrangement was halted immediately upon the discovery of wrongdoing. Nothing about Mr. Sharma needed to be discovered in 2021. In June 2018, almost three years before Director General Thomas signed with him, IMO Circular Letter No. 3854 was addressed to all Member States, Guyana included, circulating the notice of the Government of Samoa that it had cancelled the authority of Ascent Navals.
“The Samoan press had already reported that the directors of Ascent Navals were Suniel Kumar Sharma and Jaspreet Kaur, that Samoa had revoked the authority it gave the company to run its ship registry, and that a senior Samoan maritime official faced disciplinary charges for accepting monetary gifts from the company. The United States Treasury now traces the couple’s
impersonation of flag administrations to at least 2014, beginning with Dominica, a fellow member of CARICOM. In 2022 this Government used the IMO circular system to warn the world about Mr. Sharma. That same system had warned this Government about Mr. Sharma in 2018. The warning was sitting in MARAD’s own correspondence. Either the Ministry and MARAD conducted no due diligence on a foreign company before handing it the national ship registry, or they conducted it, read the Samoan record, and signed anyway. In more than five years the Government has not produced a single document showing that any inquiry was made”.
She called on the Government to lay before the National Assembly the agreement of February 4, 2021 and the Memorandum of Understanding of March 3, 2021, together with every document reflecting the due diligence conducted before either was signed and the name of the person or entity who introduced Sharma to the Ministry of Public Works.
She also said that the Government must state whether MARAD received IMO Circular Letter No. 3854 in 2018 and what it did with it.
She stated: “It must disclose all fees and revenues paid to the State or retained by the International Maritime Safety Agency of Guyana, the complete list of vessels registered or certified during the life of the arrangement, whether the records demanded by the Attorney General were ever received, and every step taken by the Guyana Police Force and Interpol since January 2022. It must tell the nation what became of the promised US$35 million investment, the training institute at Friendship, the scholarships and the six hundred jobs, and what role GO-Invest played in facilitating the venture. Ministers Juan Edghill and Deodat Indar and Director General Stephen Thomas must each account publicly for the decision to receive Mr. Sharma, and the Government must correct the record it placed before the International Maritime Organization”.
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