One of the late Whitney Houston’s greatest power ballads was “I Have Nothing,” which she belted out in the film The Bodyguard way back in 1993, and which has achieved over a billion views on YouTube.
However, I don't really need to look very much further, to find some marine companies in a similar situation. Let’s see what’s happening on the Clyde, in Tasmania, in New Zealand, in Oman, and in Guinea-Bissau.
Last week, we reported how the Scottish state-owned shipbuilder Ferguson Marine has announced that it will cut nearly a quarter of its workforce, via a voluntary redundancy process, through which it expects 70 posts will be terminated.
The fundamental problem is that after the nine-year delivery delays and massive cost overruns for the two ferries it was contracted to build for the state-owned ferry operator CalMac, the so-called “ferry fiasco” that has been fermenting for a decade, Ferguson has no new orders. This is not really surprising, given the series of commercial disasters, financial misfortune, and operational problems encountered with the two ferries it has struggled to deliver.
At some point in the fourth quarter of the year, the final newbuild, Glen Rosa, will be handed over to CalMac, leaving the yard with only some minor subcontract work for BAE Systems on a navy job, and the inevitable warranty repairs on the ferry itself. The vessel was successfully launched into the Clyde on April 9, 2024, but two years later, the ship has only just left the yard, after a second drydocking, to the Peel Ports Group's Inchgreen Marine Park for her final, final commissioning, ahead of sea trials.
In March 2026, the Scottish Government announced its intention to throw the yard a lifeline, by providing what was described as “a strategic direct award” to Ferguson for four new vessels. These are two ferries for Caledonian Maritime Assets (CMAL), and a marine protection vessel (MPV) and a marine research vessel (MRV) for the government itself, to replace the MPV Minna and the MRV Scotia, which were originally built by Ferguson and are now nearing the end of their service lives. This promise of new contracts came after CMAL had awarded subsequent ferry contracts to Remontowa in Poland and to a shipyard in Turkey.
Unfortunately, the lack of international competitiveness has left the yard on the Clyde with only one-backstop customer – the Scottish state again. Readers will be shocked (shocked!) to learn that the announcement of the direct award came just a few weeks before the elections at the Scottish Parliament in May, elections that the Scottish National Party, which had nationalised the yard in December 2019, won under the leadership of First Minister John Swinney.
The yard and the government say that due diligence on this direct contract award is currently underway. It is not clear when it will be completed, but without new orders, the yard’s workforce has nothing to do, so the job losses are not unexpected. The unions have described the process as "a betrayal of a blameless workforce" amid the company's claims that its long-term viability as a business would be protected.
"If Mr Swinney is visiting Ferguson, he should arrive with signed contracts, not more warm words," Louise Gilmour, the secretary of the GMB Scotland union, said. "This yard was once Scotland’s ferry factory and could be again, but it needs ships to build today, not more promises of support tomorrow.”
Whilst Ms Houston sang, “Don't walk away from me,” the Scottish Government really doesn’t have the chance to walk away from Ferguson. Too much capital, both political and financial, has been invested in the yard.
For now, Ferguson has nothing, but I anticipate that won’t last for long.
At least the first of the Ferguson ferries, Glen Sannox, entered service early last year and is carrying passengers and vehicles between the Scottish mainland and the Western Isles, and it seems that Glen Rosa will also finally enter service in a few months, though both ferries were originally scheduled to be delivered in 2018.
The Australian state of Tasmania has two shiny, new and very expensive ferries it has unable to use for over a year. In March 2025, we covered the antipodean Ferry Fiasco, whereby TT-Line Company, which is owned by the State Government of Tasmania, had taken delivery of two newbuild ferries, Spirit of Tasmania IV and Spirit of Tasmania V from Rauma Marine Constructions in Finland. Once again, taxpayers were on the hook for massive cost overruns, but this time, these extra costs were mainly due to the abject failure of the state government to plan their entry to service despite years in which to get it sorted.
The ships were supposed to work in the Bass Strait between Geelong in Victoria and Devonport in Tasmania, but the new ferries are bigger than their predecessors (not a surprise as it was clearly known when they were ordered…). Unfortunately, there have been delays to the construction of an upgraded wharf at Devonport by TasPorts, the state-owned port operator. As soon as they were delivered in the Baltic, the vessels were laid up in Scotland, then a public furore erupted over the millions that was costing, so they were brought to Australia for lay-ups in Hobart and Geelong, amid media leaks, financial investigations and resignations in both TT-Line and the state government.
In May, the ABC reported that Tasmanian State Parliament's Public Accounts Committee heard the program, which started in 2018, had cost AU$717 million (US$514 million) more than was forecast in the original business case. The video footage of the CEO of TT-Line, Ken Kanofski, answering questions in parliament over the solvency of the business makes for interesting viewing (“we disagree with the auditor general… the directors determine whether the company is solvent”).
The Tasmanian Times neatly summarised the mess last year as follows:
“The new ferries were originally scheduled to begin service in 2021, but are now not expected to commence operations until October 2026 for the 2027 tourist season—a delay of five years. Conservative estimates suggest a loss of opportunity and economic benefit of approximately AU$400 million (US$290 million) per year, bringing the total delayed costs to AU$2 billion (US$1.4 billion).
"The initial shipbuilder went into insolvency, leading to a new contract with a Finnish company for AU$850 million (US$610 million). No costs for this change have been released, but they were certainly substantial. When the new contractor faced financial difficulties, TT-Line paid an additional AU$80 million (US$57 million) to complete construction. The fit-out costs for the two ships, while never publicly released, are believed to be around AU$100 million (US$72 million), bringing the estimated total construction cost to AU$1 billion (US$720 million).
"Compounding this, TT-Line and TasPorts were locked in a protracted negotiation over a new berth to accommodate the larger vessels without ministerial input. The Mersey berth was initially budgeted at AU$90 million (US$64 million), but delays and disagreements have escalated the cost to AU$500 million (US$360 million).”
Whitney Houston sang, “I'll never ask for too much,” but even she may have baulked at the costs Tasmania has incurred on the poor execution of this project.
This weekend, Spirit of Tasmania IV finally arrived in Devonport for the first time, with Tasmania Premier Jeremy Rockliff among the crowd welcoming the ship.
To finally enter service? Oh, not that. It was for the connection to the shore and its hydraulics and loading systems to be tested, before it returned to Victoria. The sister vessel will undergo similar tests in September. Both ships have already conducted the same tests in Geelong, and they may finally enter service in October, around 18 months since they delivered in Finland.
Whereas Ms Houston sang that she, “can't run from myself, there's nowhere to hide,” it is clear that in both Tasmania and Scotland, politicians have had plenty of places to hide in these multi-year, train crash, ferry contracts. In both countries, the same political parties – the Liberals in Tasmania and the Scottish Nationalists in Scotland – were in power at the state level throughout the fiascos.
The Liberals have run Tasmania since 2012 and the SNP Scotland since 2007, and the electorate has voted them in again and again, despite the demonstrable incompetence shown in their handling of their respective ferry contracts. We can mock the bad decisions and the massive bills incurred by taxpayers, but if voters are unwilling or unable to hold decision makers to account – and in the case of the SNP to overlook the jailing of the former Party Chairman Peter Murrell for over five years for embezzling over US$500,000 of party funds – then who are the fools?
For too many people in Tasmania and Scotland, “It’s not right, but it’s okay.”
At least Tasmania has a pair of large, multi-million dollar vessels on which the next generation of Australian seafarers can work, and a massive naval nuclear submarine programme, on which we shall not comment.
July saw the end of domestic container services in New Zealand, when Swire Shipping cancelled the nation’s only locally-flagged domestic container shipping service. The 1,700TEU vessel Moana Chief entered service in 2019, but has now left the country and will not be returned to domestic service. Her Kiwi crew have been laid off.
To say that the maritime situation in New Zealand is dire would be an understatement. The country has experienced a de-skilling in seafaring and a lack of capital investment in marine assets in a way that is unprecedented in any developed country. There are now middle income Southeast Asian, African and even Caribbean countries with greater marine capabilities than New Zealand, along more local seafarers and more competent ministries of transport.
At a time when the Strait of Hormuz crisis and renewed attacks in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea have highlighted the vulnerability of global supply chains to disruption, New Zealand seems blissfully unaware ignorant of its own vulnerability.
No man is an island (unless you are named Mauritius), and New Zealand is a pair of large islands with a heavy dependence on seaborne trade. New Zealand imports all its refined petroleum and vehicles and all its industrial machinery and electronics, mostly by sea, whilst it agricultural exports, especially wine, dairy and meat, are also dependent on ships to get to market.
For years, we have been highlighting the need for emergency towing vessels. New Zealand is absurdly vulnerable in this respect, dependent on a few small harbour tugs to protect 15,000 kilometres of environmentally pristine coastline on which a significant tourism industry depends. The lack of emergency towing capability is critical because the decline of the country’s oil and gas industry means that there is no guaranteed domestic anchor handling fleet in-country anymore, and relief tugs from Australia will take days to arrive.
In May this year, the New Zealand Transport Investigation Commission (TAIC) finally released its findings into the blackout and loss of propulsion on the Interislander ferry Kaitaki, which had happened in January 2023. Yes, issuing the report took more than three years after the incident occurred, and it contained nothing we did not expect.
After a total loss of power with over 800 people on board, the ferry drifted towards a lee shore in rough conditions. Crew stabilised the situation and the ship later berthed safely. A degraded rubber expansion joint in the engine cooling system had failed , which triggered an automatic shutdown, the report found, noting that the part had exceeded its service life.
TAIC found six safety issues, including ageing asset management, engineering decision support, emergency response coordination, and national towage capability. It also found planning and practice for a major maritime emergency fell short of requirements. No sh*t, Sherlock.
This is not rocket science. We had already noted these same problems in our editorial “Cook Strait checkmate: new solutions for safer New Zealand ferries” in May 2024. We repeated the call for the country to invest in emergency towing vessels in October 2024. Unlike Ms Houston, I'm NOT, “holdin' back again this passion inside,” in my case a passion for salvage tugs, oil spill response equipment and maritime firefighting capability.
The sinking of the Royal New Zealand naval survey vessel HMNZS Manawanui, which struck a reef and sank in a marine park off Samoa in October 2024 whilst conducting a hydrographic survey, highlighted a shambolic lack of experience and the dysfunctional government bureaucracy.
The US$60 million vessel, the former subsea vessel Edda Fonn (built in 2003), was lost when the ship’s autopilot was not disengaged when it should have been. The crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, as a consequence, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure. Nobody died, thankfully, but the government apparently lacks the funds to replace the ship, which seems not to have been insured, and instead has begun to reactivate the mothballed patrol vessel HMNZS Otago.
In March this year, the navy announced that three officers had been charged in connection with loss of Manawanui, which was the first peacetime sinking of an Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN) ship. Those charged included Commander Yvonne Gray, a 20-year RNZN veteran who was Manawanui's commanding officer at the time of the incident. Again, no date for the court martial has been released and it seems that, again, years will pass before justice is served.
We note that a simple court martial over an alleged kiss on the cheek at a social event in March 2023 was not resolved until February 2026. Commander Bornwyn Heslop was exonerated by the court as the commanding officer of HMNZS Canterbury. No wonder the country has no emergency towage capability, a dangerously small pool of maritime expertise and a navy that would be better suited to the government of Guinea-Bissau, as we shall see below. New Zealand has a government that seems incapable of taking decisions and acting in a timely manner.
I guess we can’t criticise Scotland for investing in a shipyard and buying ships when New Zealand seems pathologically incapable of making any serious investments in maritime resilience, emergency response, and seafaring skills.
Another country that is paying a terrible price for a lack of emergency towage and salvage capability is Oman. If whichever government bigwig or consultant runs New Zealand’s transport department wants to see what happens when a marine casualty meets a lack of national emergency response capability, they can look at the unfolding horror of the oil spill from the "dark fleet" Suezmax tanker Caroline Bezengi, which is now breaking up since grounding inside an Omani marine reserve in the vicinity of the Hallaniyat Islands in the Dhofar Governorate on June 12.
Ambrey of the UK was appointed the salvor just shy of two months after the incident occurred. I have no idea what magical thinking led the Omani Government to believe that somehow doing nothing would fantastically lift the tanker intact and all its cargo unspilled from the rocks on which it was lodged.
The fully laden tanker was either falsely flagged or disowned by Cameroon as its registry but was carrying one million barrels of sanctioned Russian oil loaded in Novorossiysk when it suffered a mysterious explosion off Yemen and then went aground off the south coast of Oman on a rocky outcrop at Al Qibliya Island.
Because it is stateless, the vessel has no insurance, and its former or purported flag state of Cameroon has neither the financial resources nor the expertise nor the will to intervene. Whichever insurer issued its blue card to confirm cover is not responding and the tanker’s owners and managers have been completely silent. Oman itself is a major flag of dark fleet tankers carrying Russian oil, so there is a certain grim irony about the situation.
An investigation by Ian Talley and Ryan Bacic of global risk consultancy Kharon found all the usual opaque corporate structures, shell companies, open registries with inadequate compliance checks, and dodgy money behind Caroline Bezengi.
The Kharon report noted that the ship’s registered owners and operators, “are connected to a fleet of additional high-risk and sanctioned vessels, including one that Swedish authorities boarded just back in March on suspicion of its being unseaworthy.” They also found connections to Aleksejs Halavins, “a Cyprus-based, Latvian national” whom the American government designated as a major player in the dirty business of shipping sanctioned Russian crude through substandard ships.
You can see Mr Halavins’ entry on the sanctions-finder.com website but you can also read about his remarkable personal journey, his love of the sea, and his fascinating yachting trips with intellectual company here and here in the Cyprus Mail.
My favourite puff piece is here, where we learn that the, “defining feature of these trips is the participation of creative individuals—actors, directors, musicians and writers—not as performers, but as guests. Halavins emphasises that this isn’t about celebrity or entertainment. These are close friends who join the journey not for publicity, but for genuine connection.”
Let’s not stop to wonder how such a cultured and charming man fell on the wrong side of sanctions, nor to consider his genuine connection to claims that he has traded US$2 billion of sanctioned Russian oil. However, the alleged connections to the deadly dark fleet might lead Mr Halavins’ guests to reconsider their sailing plans in future.
The investigators found that the polluting tanker’s last listed owner was Marshall Islands-registered Rentoor Shipmanagement, which was dissolved in February, whilst its last listed manager was Villar Shipmanagement, another Marshall Islands company. One of the ironies here is that all Marshall Islands shipping companies as registered in the “trust complex” in Majuro. One might hope that the authorities would trust less and verify more.
Ambrey announced on August 13 that, “specialist personnel have already boarded the vessel with the support of the Royal Air Force of Oman to assess conditions onboard and commence cargo and vessel stabilisation.”
We wish Ambrey every success, but WTF was the government of Oman doing for the preceding seven weeks??? In any emergency response when a tanker is aground, a fast reaction to try to refloat it and minimise damage is essential.
One of the few outlets providing relatively up to date coverage of the catastrophe is the Muscat Daily, which reported more than a week ago that the 2,000-square-kilometre oil slick has already polluted Duqm’s Ras Madrakah coast, where a stretch of 12 kilometres of beach has been soiled with oil. The Omani authorities stated at the time that no pollution had so far been detected along the shores of Masirah Island and that desalination operations there were unaffected.
On August 10, Oman reported that the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan had been raised from level one to level two. Again, this would seem to be six weeks too late. The tanker is listing and without power, the crew abandoned ship in June, and only now the authorities are starting to act seriously as oil from the ruptured hull spills out. Winds of 40 knots and four-metre swells have prevented the discharge of the remaining cargo from the stricken vessel, but seven weeks of delays cannot have helped the situation.
If Oman had a decent emergency towage vessel and in-country capability, the bad situation in June might have not become so much worse in August.
Oman’s awful oil spill is a reminder of the dangers of the dark fleet and of the need for effective national response capacity. Oman was not involved in Caroline Bezengi’s trade but now finds itself responsible for an oil spill response bill, a salvage situation, and pollution damage that will likely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally, this report by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) shows what the terrible cost of China’s state sponsored industrial fishing to Africa. We hear over and over how the Chinese are bringing investment to poor nations through the "Belt and Road" initiative. Then we read reports on the plunder of natural resources, the impoverishment of local people in Africa, and the complete lack of sustainability in China’s fishing policy.
The OCCRP report is a must read on overfishing, greed and plunder by the Chinese-owned floating fishmeal factory facilities Tian Yi He 6 and Hua Xin 17 after the vessels arrived in Guinea-Bissau in 2019 and 2024, respectively. The report begins as follows:
“A Guinea-Bissau fisheries assessment obtained by OCCRP shows that the sardinella — an important food source — has been decimated in the years since two Chinese fishmeal-production vessels set up shop offshore. After the industry was banned earlier this year, the floating factories moved south to Sierra Leone.”
Ms Houston closes with the line, “Don't make me close one more door, I don't wanna hurt anymore.”
Closing the door to factory fishing in African waters might be a great place to start.