French Transport Ministry News

Pirates off the coast of Somalia, who hijacked an oil tanker with eight Sri Lankan crew on board, are demanding a ransom for the release of the vessel, the EU Naval Force said. The pirates seized the Comoros-flagged Aris 13 tanker on Monday, the first such hijacking in the region since 2012, and took it to the port of Alula in the semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland. "The EU Naval Force ... has received positive confirmation from the master of ... Aris 13, that his ship and crew are currently being held captive by a number of suspected armed pirates in an anchorage off the north coast of Puntland, close to Alula," the force said in a statement late on Tuesday.

Pirates have hijacked an oil tanker with eight Sri Lankan crew on board, Somali authorities said on Tuesday, the first time a commercial ship has been seized in the region since 2012. Security forces have been sent to free the Aris 13, a regional police official said late on Tuesday. "We are determined to rescue the ship and its crew. Our forces have set off to Alula. It is our duty to rescue ships hijacked by pirates and we shall rescue it," Abdirahman Mohamud Hassan, director general of Puntland’s marine police forces, told Reuters by phone. Puntland is a semi-autonomous northern region of Somalia. Alula is a port town there where pirates have taken the tanker. Experts said the ship was an easy target and ship owners were becoming lax after a long period of calm.

The Philippine coast guard inspected a North Korean cargo vessel that docked at a port northwest of Manila in one of the first such checks since the U.N. Security Council imposed further sanctions on Pyongyang over its nuclear program, reports AP. The 6,830 dwt general cargo ship Jin Teng is among 31 vessels that could be forced to stop trading after being included in an asset freeze against a North Korean shipping company under the tightened sanctions passed unanimously by the Security Council. The registered owner is Golden Soar Development, which has an address in Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui tourist district, according to the Equasis shipping database hosted by the French transport ministry, although there was no telephone listing for the company.

Europe has yet to fully wake up to the danger of maritime disasters caused by signal jamming and blackouts of satellite navigation devices, say the proponents of a back up system on trial in British and Dutch ports. Ships increasingly rely on systems that employ satellite signals to find a location or keep exact time including the Global Positioning System (GPS) and GLONASS. But experts say such systems are vulnerable to signal loss from solar weather effects or radio and satellite interference and can also be affected by intentional jamming by criminal gangs, nation states or potentially from militant groups. The General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland (GLA) is pioneering a radio-based back-up prototype called eLoran.

Christine Cabau Woehrel has taken up her new role as CEO of the Marseilles Fos port authority after two years heading the Port of Dunkirk. She succeeds Jean-Claude Terrier following a French transport ministry nomination that was backed by the port’s supervisory board in February and has now been confirmed by government decree. Her move marks a return to the headquarters city of CMA GGM, France’s biggest and the world’s third largest container carrier, where she worked from 1987-2011.

The Marseilles FOS port authority’s supervisory board has backed a French transport ministry proposal nominating Port of Dunkirk head Christine Cabau Woehrel as the new CEO in Marseilles. There is also a new chairman and deputy chairperson. Backing for the CEO's nomination came when the supervisory board launched its latest five-year term by also electing a chairman and deputy chairman from the 17-strong line-up of governmental, industry, business and staff representatives. The CEO's appointment will be ratified by a ministerial decree.

Clean-up vessels have completed pumping oil from the sunken tanker Erika off France's Atlantic coast, the French Transport Ministry said on Tuesday. "Today, risks of pollution linked to the sunken ship Erika have been eliminated," the ministry said in a statement. It added that TotalFinaElf, the oil giant that chartered the tanker and was in charge of the pumping, had recovered a total 11,235 tons of heavy fuel oil from the ship since the beginning of the operation on July 3. The Maltese-registered Erika broke in half in stormy seas on December 12, 1999, and spewed up to 15,000 tons of oil onto the rocky shoreline. The two sections of the ship lie about 70 km (40 miles) offshore.

France plans to press for tougher maritime safety rules within a 200-mile radius of Europe, said French transport ministry officials, adding that they would like the European Union to force ships to identify themselves and be ready for inspection inside the limit. Currently, ships only have to make themselves known if there is an accident. Officials also fell that flags of convenience should be banned. This does not mean countries would not be allowed to run large fleets, but they would be held to tighter rules. France also plans to double the number of its port inspectors to 100 over the next two years and improve its database of ships calling at French ports.

Oil giant TotalFina, which chartered the ill-fated oil tanker Erika, tightened its policy on chartering older tankers. However, company officials stressed that a new age limit on large ships, which would not have stopped it chartering the mid-sized Erika, needed to be backed up by tougher international maritime standards and greater transparency of safety checks. "We still need a global initiative and we are still calling for tighter controls and for charterers to have more access to documents (on seaworthiness checks)," TotalFina spokeswoman Isabelle Galldraud said. The company is cutting to 20 years from 25 the upper age limit on chartered vessels of 80,000 deadweight tons and above, while keeping it at 25 years for smaller ships.