![COLUMN | Summer Shorts 2026: The Odyssey; You Can't Win; the Nord Stream conspiracy; fake tan/fake ministry [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-08-10%2Fwo3o15gr%2FUntitled-November-24-2025-at-09.11.06-1.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
Ah, the summer holidays in the northern hemisphere are at their peak. Europe and the US are baking under a heat wave, every email seems to be met with an automatic out of office reply, and the beaches of the Mediterranean are packed with bronzed and dehydrated bodies.
It is also the season for national days, so there has never been a better time not to do any work, unless you are at sea. But maybe an excuse for a festive barbeque with the crew?
Today marks the public holiday for August 9th National Day in Singapore with a fighter jet flyby and a parade at the National Stadium in the Kallang on the theme, “Majulah Singapura, Go Beyond!” I think that motto will surely be a hook for future articles…
Ecuador commemorates its declaration of independence from Spain in 1809 today, Pakistan celebrates Independence Day on August 14, commemorating freedom from British rule in 1947, whilst the next day, India has a public holiday for its own emancipation from the British colonial oppressors. South Korea has its Liberation Day (Gwangbokjeol) on August 15, celebrating independence from Japanese rule in 1945, on the same day that the Republic of Congo also celebrates its freedom from France, achieved in 1960. But can one ever be truly free of the French?
Then it is the Indonesian National “Merdeka” Day on August 17th (selamat tinggal to the Dutch in 1945 after 350 years) and then the holiday President Putin certainly does not celebrate, the Independence Day of Ukraine on August 24, in commemoration of its Declaration of Independence from the USSR in 1991. The month closes with a triple celebration on August 31, which is the Philippines' National Heroes Day, Malaysian Merdeka Day, marking independence from British rule in 1957, and finally Trinidad and Tobago Independence Day, commemorating the Caribbean state’s independence from the UK in 1962.
And fifty mainly Catholic countries across Europe and Africa and elsewhere (Guatemala, Chile, Madagascar) take the day off for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin on Saturday, August 15, or Monday, August 17. Assumption is usually condemned as the mother of all foul-ups in offshore, but in this case it’s the mother of all public holidays to celebrate the day on which Catholics believe Mary ascended into heaven. August is probably the lowest productivity month in the calendar globally, except for December. You have an excuse every week for the rest of the month. Enjoy!
So, don’t stress that you can’t achieve anything at work, don’t panic that you failed to lead a revolutionary nationalist movement to liberate your country, and certainly don’t fret that you have not yet ascended into paradise having been a parent to Christ. Instead, order a Hugo or an Aperol Spritz (Diet Coke or Fanta if you are working on a ship or rig) lie back on your sun lounger/your towel on the monkey island, and enjoy our 2026 Summer Shorts selection.
They don’t make them like they used to. Whilst modern seafarers complain about wifi connectivity and Starlink reception problems, and the Aussie and Norwegian unions blanche at tours beyond four weeks offshore, the ancient Greeks had it tougher, as Christopher Nolan’s epic, Imax retelling of Homer’s three-thousand-year-old poem The Odyssey makes clear.
The summer blockbuster opens with a nameless bard singing as riders from the city of Troy approach a towering wooden horse left behind on the beach by the Greek army that has seemingly fled. The Trojans drag their equine prize toward their now doomed city and the song cuts off mid-verse… this is not going to be a linear narrative. Instead, we have a decade-long sea voyage around a fantastical Mediterranean, and a star-studded cast to enjoy over nearly three hours.
The action moves to Ithaca in Greece, where King Odysseus has been missing since the fall of Troy, eight years previously, so suitors have descended upon his palace hoping to marry his widow, Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), whilst his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) refuses to accept the loss of his father, but is increasingly at risk from would-be stepfathers, who would prefer Odysseus’ heir dead.
The film works through a series of flashbacks to the long and often fatal voyage home from Troy, as Matt Damon’s Odysseus and his fleet face the wrath of the sea god Poseidon. There are more swords and sandals and divine retribution than the coveralls, hard hats and HSE forms we see in modern-day maritime situations. Odysseus’ crew suffer terrible mortality rates amid multiple incidents featuring witches, giants, cyclops, sirens, storms, and the wiles of Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso.
The mind boggles how Shell or BP would cope with an accident caused by seafarers turning into pigs after a feast laced with the magic of the witch Circe, or multiple fatalities caused by a monstrous sea creature snatching sailors from the deck of a ship as payback by the sea god. Risk assessments appear not to have been performed, neither when the sacred cattle of the sun god were slaughtered, but especially not when Odysseus’ men behead a kneeling priestess of Athena (Zendaya) beside her goddess’s desecrated statue, as Troy burns and the city is sacked.
It’s a great film, it is a lot of fun, and this is how cinema should be: big, bold and brash.
When I saw there was a film called You Can’t Win showing in Amazon Prime, I assumed it much be about marine contracting with Saudi Aramco, ADNOC or Chevron, especially when a grizzled character intoned halfway through that, “this is a crooked business.”
But it’s not, and the dubious purchase deals for ships and rigs between ADNOC Logistics and Services and companies controlled by relatives of its staff members are not featured at all. Sad!
Instead, You Can’t Win is based on the bestselling 1920s memoirs of the same name by a thief and opium addict named Jack Black, who argued for prison reform and an end to torture, based on his horrific experiences in jail (wardens in bowler hats brandishing leather belts were to be avoided then as now). The film was originally shot in 2012, but was delayed for over a decade in post-production until its release this year. Curiously, this meant that two of the minor actors had become famous in the interim, Jeremy Allen White and Julia Garner.
Rather like dealing with the major oil companies, the plot is episodic and confusing, with jumps through time, a soundtrack that is loud and jarring, and lots of scenes shot in the dark where you can’t actually see what is going on, like the midnight watch in a standby safety vessel in the North Sea in December.
Michael Pitt plays Black and spends a lot of the film in a white shirt and black waistcoat, either sneaking around at night doing burglaries, in a drug- or alcohol-related stupor, or being caught stealing from people, including a sleeping Cantonese man who wakes and threatens to decapitate him with a meat cleaver. The Jack Black book from 1926 inspired a lot of the writing of the Beat Movement later, but Black himself was impoverished by the Great Depression and just disappeared in 1933; the film implies he killed himself by drowning (spoiler alert).
I think the film will be a slow burner.
The Nord Stream gas pipelines, majority owned by Russian state energy company Gazprom, and which ran down the Baltic between Russia and Germany, went out with a bang, or rather a series of bangs, on September 26, 2022, when three out of four of the lines were mysteriously blown up in a dramatic act of sabotage in international waters.
First gas had flowed from Nord Stream 1 in 2011, and it was the longest subsea pipeline in the world, stretching over 1,200 kilometres from Vyborg, with the capacity for each of its twin 48-inch lines to carry 27.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year to Greifswald in Germany.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski denounced Nord Stream as “the Molotov-Ribbentrip Pipeline.” Nord Stream 2 ran in parallel and finally completed construction in September 2021, delayed after Swiss contractor Allseas pulled out due to American pressure, but it never actually entered service.
Mr Pancevski is a reporter with The Wall Street Journal and this incredibly well-researched book reads like a thriller, albeit one where the main suspects are never named due to the ongoing criminal cases against them. Their risk-taking verges on the reckless, but it delivered a huge blow to future Russian gas exports, even if peace is eventually achieved in the war with Ukraine and western sanctions on Russia are lifted.
Nord Stream offered Germany dependency on cheap Russian gas, and crooked former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder a lucrative chairman’s position at the pipeline holding company and on the board of Rosneft. The geopolitical importance of the sabotage has led many to believe that perhaps the CIA was behind the plot, but this carefully researched book suggests it was undertaken by a group of fearless Ukrainian patriots willing to venture their lives for their objective. The author never establishes any proof that the government in Kyiv was even aware of the plot before the pipeline was ruptured.
Instead, Pancevski’s work is a gripping account of how six freelance Ukrainian divers, sailors and soldiers acted on their own initiative and operated from a small yacht they had chartered, managing to detonate explosives on the concrete-clad, seabed pipes to sever Nord Stream. According to Mr Pancevski, the whole sabotage operation only cost around US$250,000 but ended up destroying infrastructure that had cost billions and many years to install.
German prosecutors have subsequently charged six suspects, one of whom, a Ukrainian military officer named Serhiy Kuznetsov, was extradited from Italy at the end of last year to stand trial for destroying the energy link. Another suspect has died on the battlefront in eastern Ukraine.
Sensationally, however, the second suspect the German authorities sought to extradite for the explosions was arrested in Poland, but was then released after a judge denied the extradition request. This was not because there was a lack of evidence against Volodymyr Zhuravlyov, but because the judge hearing the case in Warsaw, Dariusz Lubowski, argued that any Ukrainian sabotage of Russian infrastructure following the Kremlin’s “bloody and genocidal attack” on Ukraine in 2022 was a “justified and legally fair act” for which he should not face trial in Germany.
Given the ongoing Russian ballistic missile and Shahed drone attacks on apartment buildings and railway stations in Ukraine, it is hard to disagree. If the Nord Stream Conspiracy teaches us anything, it is that critical energy infrastructure is vulnerable to attack if the saboteurs are determined and passionate. No surprise that suddenly subsea defence equipment makers are the targets of massive investor interest. What happened to Nord Stream in 2022 could easily happen to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline transporting natural gas to southern Europe from the Shah Deniz II field in Azerbaijan, or to the Langeled pipeline between Norway and Scotland, or to any of the fibre optic data cables on which global internet traffic depends.
Finally, if you are stuck on, say, on the anchor handlers Tor Viking or Skandi Hera or the platform supply vessels Edde Frende or Island Contender, which brokers Hagland show are idle and available promotin western Norway in their excellent website, what can you do to get a tan? Whilst the rest of Europe burns under a scorching sun, Bergen and Stavanger report Norwegian weather as normal, with light rain forecast pretty much every day and daily highs of around 13 degrees Celsius this week.
Fake tan is the only solution, but there is no shame in fake tan.
Nigeria, on the other hand, has discovered a much more alarming problem: a fake ministry headed by (and I know this will shock many readers) a Nigerian prince, one who (surprise) appears to have been scamming his own government, rather than foreigners by email.
David Pilling in the Financial Times has the sensational tale of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), which claimed to be set up to attract foreign investment into Nigeria. The agency was blessed with approved funds in the federal budget of nearly US$1 million, a seemingly genuine office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja, and a website using the official government of Nigeria domain in its address. The body even opened an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria after allegedly presenting what were purported to be official government documents to the Office of the Accountant-General. It also requested a note verbale from the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to facilitate diplomatic visa applications for some of its staff to go the United States.
There was only one small problem. The PFIPC did not officially exist. It had no legal standing.
Now Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, who claimed to run the fake agency, is due to appear in court next month to answer charges of forgery and impersonation. We should stress that the Nigerian royal denies the charges. Two other suspects, whom the police have identified only as Femi and Anu, are currently fugitives from justice.
Pulse Nigeria has reported how the good prince appointed himself Director-General of the non-genuine body, then, “hosted ambassadors, held meetings with ministers, wrote official letters to government agencies, requested diplomatic support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and even represented Nigeria at international events while presenting himself as the head of the council.”
The bigger problem, of course, is what this tells us about Nigerian Government and legislative oversight of the 2026 federal budget of around NGN68 trillion (circa US$50 billion). Lawmakers were supposed to have scrutinised the budget in legislation known as the 2,604-page 2026 Appropriation Act, which was passed after several readings in both houses, and which President Bola Tinubu signed into law on April 17.
The Presidency has maintained that the PFIPC never existed officially, and the police prosecution continues. Nigerians are rightly asking how this scam got so far for so long, and what other brazen frauds are being perpetuated in the budget, which have not been identified.
By all means, if you have to endure the weather in Bergen or Stavanger, treat yourself to fake tan. You deserve it. But the people of Nigeria should not be enduring fake agencies syphoning off nearly a million dollars of government funds on a prince and his canape and champagne parties for foreign ambassadors.
Happy holidays!
Background reading
Per Högselius is Professor of History of Technology at KTH University in Stockholm and he has written an excellent short history of the Nord Stream pipelines here.
Our 2025 Holiday Shorts piece featured four maritime films and two books, being two tales of heroism and survival against the odds, and one of technological hubris and reckless corner-cutting, which led to death and disaster in a mini-submarine near the wreck of Titanic.
Our other film review of this year asked “What does China’s Crimson Tide tell us about Asia-Pacific geopolitics?” and looked at Operation Hadad, a lavish Chinese blockbuster.
In 2024, we recommended Joseph Conrad’s classic novella of colonial misrule and barbarity in Africa, Heart of Darkness, and David Grann’s horrible tale of an eighteenth century shipwreck and a mutiny on an isolated and frigid South American island, The Wager.
