The parliamentary faction of the Action and Solidarity Party announces that it will propose to the Parliament a draft law amending Moldova’s Admiralty Law. According to the Action and Solidarity Party deputy, Radu Marian, only the companies that have the recognition of the European Commission should be allowed to check the registered ships, and the cost of registering the ships must be substantially increased.

On August 10, Marian announced that the Action and Solidarity Party faction will request several amendments to Moldova’s Admiralty Law.

“Currently, Moldova has more than 300 ships registered under its flag. For comparison, Romania, with hundreds of kilometers of access to the Black Sea, has up to 10 merchant ships registered under its flag. 

The situation is so serious that Moldova has been on the Blacklist of Ports all over the world for many years – next to us in the list are countries like Togo, Tanzania, or Sierra Leone. 

For this reason, ships under the Moldovan flag are seized, inspected, and stopped at every step. Rightly – many of them are in a deplorable technical condition and are extremely old – according to data obtained from the naval agency – the average age of ships registered in the last two years is 33 years,“ said the deputy.

In 2013, a Moldovan-flagged ship carrying 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate was stopped and seized in Beirut due to technical problems.

The legislator announced that three weeks ago he sent a request to the naval agency, requesting a series of information, including the number of ships registered under the national flag in the period 2019-2020, the age of the ships, and whether they were inspected before being registered.

“The Naval Agency did not carry out any flag inspections, due to the lack of a regulatory framework,” the agency responded.”Inevitably, politicians are involved in this whole story, more precisely, a man of Dodon, Socialist Deputy, sailor Anatolie Labuneț. In the reply received from the Naval Agency, a list of the largest local representatives of these registered vessels was indicated. One of these companies – Marine Engineering, according to an investigation of ZdG from February 2020, is affiliated through intermediaries to the deputy Labuneț,” specified Marian.

In order to discourage fraudulent schemes and not allow Moldovan ships to endanger lives, the Action and Solidarity Party proposes to control the registered vessels. However, the checks should be carried out only by companies recognized by the European Commission. The party also proposed to increase several times the cost of recording. According to the party, the current cost of 1,000 is far too modest.

Moldova is known worldwide for the fraudulent schemes in which Moldovan-flagged ships are involved. In September 2016, three ships under the flag of Moldova were used by human smugglers to illegally transport over 2,000 refugees from the Orient to the European Union (EU). In October 2018, a ton of cocaine was found on a ship under the Moldovan flag. In November 2019, a ship operating illegally under the flag of Moldova sank in Odessa and caused an ecological catastrophe.