![COLUMN | Just do your job: Singapore and Malaysia, port state inspections, Tanzania flag and the sad case of Golden Star 1 [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-06-15%2F7425fjwn%2FUntitled-November-24-2025-at-09.11.06.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
We should open this with a disclaimer that Singapore is one of the world’s most respected flag states with an enviable safety record and a high quality fleet, that the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) in Singapore is admired for its high standards and efficiency, and that the city state is consistently rated has having one of the most impartial and efficient legal systems in the world.
Many view Singapore as a high-tech, high-wage carefully managed centre of excellence in maritime planning, shipping governance and marine management. As we shall see, Singaporean-flagged vessels have some of the lowest rates of port state detention in the world...
...which makes what happened ten days ago even harder to explain.
On June 5, at around 22:30 Singapore time, the cargo vessel Golden Star 1 (IMO number 8952857) registered under the flag of Tanzania (note that detail; it may be important), was underway from Singapore to Malaysia with 107 containers, when she encountered difficulties.
The unusually designed vessel, with its distinctly low freeboard, was operated by a Singaporean company known as Pancon. I tried to contact Pancon, but their website www.pancon.com.sg is currently out of service. Strange, that.
Golden Star 1 suddenly floundered and sank about six kilometres off the Indonesian island of Batam. Fortunately, all nine crewmembers were safely rescued by the Indonesian authorities. The MPA promptly issued navigational broadcasts advising vessels to exercise caution when transiting the area, and to report any sighting of containers adrift.
The vessel appears to have been engaged in the shortsea shipment of containers between Singapore and the neighbouring port of Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia for many years.
It seems strange that the vessel was able to trade on such a route for so long. Why do I say that?
Golden Star 1 was built in 1995. If we look at risk factors, the vessel would seem to fall straight into the highest categories of risk for maritime safety. Why did the Malaysian and Singaporean authorities not place the vessel under greater scrutiny?
There are more red flags about this vessel than in a May Day parade in Beijing.
Golden Star 1 was 31 years old when she sank, older than most footballers playing at the World Cup and older than most vessels trading internationally. Classification societies and owners of older vessels are always at pains to point out that the age of an individual ship is not an indicator of quality, and that the condition of an individual ship is ultimately determined by how it is maintained.
However, DNV has reported that the rise in incidents in recent years has disproportionately been driven by vessels over 25 years of age. And spontaneously sinking off Batam in the middle of a voyage, as Golden Star 1 did just ten days ago, is probably a sign that something was amiss.
Then there is the flag. Tanzania has many strengths: Mount Kilimanjaro, safari holidays, and gold exports being three. The country is blessed with massive deepwater gas reservoirs, as yet not brought into production, and the unforgettable plains of the Serengeti.
Sadly, Tanzania as a flag state has a terrible record by any measure. In September 2018, the ferry Nyerere capsized on Lake Victoria and 228 people died. In May 2024, the Tanzanian general cargo vessel Mohammad Z sank in the Black Sea with the deaths of three crewmembers. In September 2025 a small Tanzanian flagged bulker sank off Kish Island in Iran whilst underway with 2,500 tons of cement from the UAE to Kuwait, although in that case the 12 crewmembers survived. In July 2024, Taiwan rescue teams searched in vain for the six crew who perished when the Tanzania-flagged cargo ship Fu Shun sank in a typhoon after sailing from Kaohsiung, as we reported at the time. Three crewmembers were saved.
There had also been a near miss a few months before. Video footage released by the Suez Canal Authority in April 2024 showed the 3,000-dwt Tanzania-flag Labatros listing heavily to starboard near Port Said in northern Egypt, but the sinking was narrowly averted as per Tradewinds.
"As part of our safety and environmental responsibilities, we promptly investigate maritime casualties such as loss of lives resulting from overloading on boats, collision, etc, and take the appropriate actions," the Tanzanian flag state declared on its homepage.
However, the most recent accident report is from 2019, detailing the horrific explosion on the 1992-built Tanzanian flag gas carrier Candy whilst engaged in a ship-to-ship transfer with the 1990-built Tanzanian flag gas carrier Maestro near Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. Twenty seafarers lost their lives in the ensuing fireball, which took six weeks to burn out.
It is fair to say that Tanzanian-flagged vessels have a dreadful loss record, and the sinking of Golden Star 1 only cements the dire reputation of the registry. Given the number of Tanzanian flag vessels that have been lost, why weren’t Singapore and Malaysia’s port state authorities taking a great interest in a vessel from a registry with such a bad reputation?
But whilst some Tanzanian-flagged vessels have been lost at sea, including Candy and Maestro in the most horrific circumstances, others have been involved in some of the most dramatic findings of recent years – drug seizures.
This year, El Salvador’s navy announced the largest drug seizure in the country’s history after intercepting the (surprise!) Tanzanian-flagged 54 metres LOA offshore support vessel FMS Eagle off its Pacific coast in international waters for carrying cocaine weighing 6.6 tons in hidden compartments.
The local press reported that the Zanzibar Maritime Authority had attempted to contact the company that owned the vessel, “but the communication was unsuccessful,” so the, “authorities fined the shipping company US$20,000.”
The ship was also promptly deregistered. If only there was an applicable adage about horses bolting and stable doors!
FMS Eagle wasn’t the first Tanzanian-flagged vessel on which large quantities of narcotics have been found. In October 2025, Spanish police announced the seizure of 6.5 tons of cocaine from a Tanzanian-flagged vessel after a dramatic high-speed boarding by law enforcement, which you can see here. A third cargo ship flying the Tanzanian flag was seized with 3.28 tons of cocaine off Lanzarote in the Canary Islands in October 2024, after sailing from Guinea Bissau.
Those three recent drug smuggling cases and sinkings all came in the wake of earnest promises by the Tanzanian President to clean up the registry in early 2018. Those pledges came after a spate of scandals involving illegal fishing vessels in the Indian Ocean, gun running, and more drug smuggling amongst the Tanzanian-flagged fleet.
“We cannot allow the name of our country to be tarnished by individuals pursuing their selfish interests,” then-President John Magufuli said at the time.
The Hellenic Coast Guard had impounded the Tanzania-flagged freighter Andromeda for carrying explosives, allegedly destined to war-torn Libya, in January 2018, whilst in December 2017, the Royal Netherlands Navy had intercepted the Tanzania-flagged tanker Kaluba (IMO 6828753), which was then carrying 1.6 tonnes of cocaine off the Dominican Republic.
Guess what? When busted by law enforcement, Tanzania again said that it had promptly revoked the registration of the vessels involved!
When seafarers on Tanzanian-flagged vessels are not being burnt alive or drowned or arrested for drug smuggling, there is the small matter of their wages not being paid.
This is the seafarer abandonment issue, which the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) has highlighted. In 2025, 26 Tanzanian-flagged vessels were involved in crew abandonment issues, the highest rate of any flag state in the world (alongside Saint Kitts and Nevis, which also had 26 cases).
Steve Trowsdale of the ITF made the following observation:
“Shipowners...hide behind paper jurisdictions while seafarers are left abandoned on rusting hulls. And when countries enable these crimes by looking the other way – or worse, profiting from them – they become complicit.”
I think it is fair to say that he had shoddy flag states like Tanzania in mind.
Again, lest you think these 26 cases in 2025 were an aberration, the ITF had highlighted Tanzania in 2022 as a registry where seafarers’ wages were routinely unpaid by unscrupulous owners, and it featured ten Syrian seafarers on the 1979-built general cargo vessel Al Maha as a sad case study.
Readers, if you are about to sign onto a Tanzanian-flagged vessel, I think Nancy Reagan’s line on drug-taking should be your mantra, too.
Just say "no."
That’s quite a record for a small flag state, and there is no evidence that the owners and the managers of Golden Star 1 were involved in any malfeasance, but they did pick a strange register for the vessel given they were a Singapore-owned company based in Singapore as per business records.
Tanzania was not the first registry for the ship. The vessel seems to have been Singapore-flagged, at least in 2002, but was then reflagged to Kiribati in 2014, then Panama in 2019, and finally Tanzania in 2024.
Astute readers will note that the changes of flag all came a year before a special survey was due. Surely that could not be more than a coincidence?
As we have seen with the "dark tanker fleet," flag-hopping is often a sign of quality issues with vessels, and is a factor that might attract the attention of vigilant port state authorities.
Every year, the International Chamber of Shipping publishes a shipping industry flag state performance table. Tanzania did not appear in the 2025/6 edition for reasons that are not clear, but in the 2024/5 edition, it received 10 out of 17 red squares indicating “potentially negative performance.” I think we can see why, although the use of the word “potentially” seems unnecessary.
Perhaps you think a few bad apples have unfairly tarnished the reputation of this august African nation’s ship registry?
The Asia Pacific Computerized Information System (APCIS) is the information system for the Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control (PSC) in the Asia Pacific Region (Tokyo MOU). The APCIS collects PSC inspection data from the Tokyo MOU member authorities and provides records on PSC inspections. You can access the data online and in real time here.
In the most recent Tokyo MOU report, dated 2024, Tanzania’s performance as a flag state was predictably dire. Many of those vessels that are not sinking, blowing up, or being seized in drug busts are being detained for safety grounds by port state inspectors.
Tanzania had the third highest percentage of detentions of any flag state under the Tokyo MOU in 2024, for states with over 20 ship inspections in that year, worse than perennial problematic registries such as Togo, Palau and the Cook Islands. It was beaten only by dark fleet shockers Cameroon, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. There were 94 PSC inspections of Tanzanian flagged ships by the Tokyo MOU port states in 2024, 92 of which found deficiencies, and 22 of which resulted in detentions. That is a 23 per cent detention rate.
We are not dealing with the vanity of small differences here. To put that 23 per cent rate into perspective, the Singapore flag had a less than one per cent detention ratio, Norway and Japan each had around 1.5 per cent, the Marshall Islands just over two per cent, the Malaysian registry three per cent, and Liberia just under four per cent. Tanzania is orders of magnitude away from these quality registries.
It was the same in Europe, where the Paris MOU PSC regime of 28 port states rated Tanzania on its “black list” as the second worst performing flag state of all 69 included in its most recent report (again for 2024), branding it a “very high risk” register, worsted only by (surprise!) Cameroon. Between 2022 and 2024, Tanzanian-flagged vessels were inspected 149 times by the Paris MOU PSC authorities and were detained 41 times – a 27 per cent detention rate, very similar to the dreadful rate found in Asia under the Tokyo MOU.
So you would think that Singapore and Malaysia would both be laser-focused on this ageing vessel operated under a high risk flag, sailing right under their noses on a trade between their two most important container ports?
The Tokyo MOU APCIS database records of port state inspection records suggest that this is not the case. Perhaps the records are wrong and perhaps inspections were performed but were not entered into the database when we checked it over the weekend.
No wrong-doing or blame or criticism is attributed by our observations or comments. Port state inspectors have heavy workloads and both Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas are very busy ports with huge volumes of large vessels calling. Port state inspection selection criteria are the prerogative of the port states in question.
Golden Star (as she was then; the “1” suffix was added in 2019 when the ship was reflagged from Kiribati to Panama) had been inspected as a Singaporean-flagged vessel in Malaysia seven times between 2002 and 2007. We assume that Singapore probably conducted additional flag state inspections in this period when the ship was under its registry.
Between January 2007 and December 2014 the ship had no records of any Tokyo MOU port state inspections.
In August 2015, under the flag of Kiribati, the ship was detained in Singapore after the PSC inspectors found 15 deficiencies. The detention made it a “high risk” vessel under the Tokyo MOU and the ship was then routinely inspected in Singapore, with 16 subsequent PSC inspections between 2015 and 2019. On the sixteenth of these in February 2019, Golden Star was again detained, when another 15 deficiencies were found, but the vessel was released the next day (we know this because there was a second Singapore PSC inspection the next day and no deficiencies were found).
The ship was then inspected again in June 2019 and January 2020 and duly marked as a high risk vessel. Then we know Covid struck and in-person port state inspections came to a grinding halt in Singapore. The vessel was inspected as a high risk ship again in March 2022, but passed and was not detained.
But since March 2022 up until the time of its sinking in June 2026, the vessel never received another port state inspection. Satellite data and a wealth of pictures on Marine Traffic show that she made port calls in Singapore and Pasir Gudang in Malaysia in 2024, 2025 and in 2026, but was not subject to port state inspection then.
This was a vessel with a record of two prior detentions in Singapore and had been inspected frequently and diligently between 2014 and 2020, but after 2022, there were no further Tokyo MOU port state inspections logged.
Why? This was a vessel that was over thirty years of age and flying one of the most dangerous and disreputable flags in the world. Nobody flagged her for a PSC violation in Singapore or Malaysia until she mysteriously sank on a voyage between the two countries, triggering a navigation alert. This seems unfortunate.
The job of PSC inspections is to prevent unsafe ships going to sea. We don’t know what caused Golden Star 1 to sink (and based on the accident reporting record of its flag state, we will probably never know), but it seems amazing to me that the ship could trade between Singapore and Malaysia, or indeed anywhere in the Tokyo MOU area, and not receive a single PSC inspection for more than four years.
Given what we know about the detention rate and the loss rate of Tanzanian flag vessels, surely any risk-based assessment system would have put Golden Star 1 as target for a PSC inspection? You don’t need AI analysis or to be an ITF campaigner to see that this vessel had an appalling risk profile, and met a dangerous but predictable end.
No seafarers lost their lives, thankfully, but the sinking of the vessel must surely be a reminder to port states everywhere that if a ship appears to have a high-risk profile, it should be a target for regular inspection.
Golden Star 1 had more red flags than the Pamplona bull run. Other vessels with similar profiles should be subject to stringent inspections. The IMO should be challenging Tanzania on its dreadful loss and detention rates. As a flag state, Tanzania said, “The registry undertakes strict measures in its commitment to maintaining high standards of safety and operational performance of Tanzania-Zanzibar vessels.”
Since this is clearly not the case, port states are the only line of defence to protect against substandard shipping and to protect seafarers from the scoundrels who abuse the weak regulations of flag of convenience like Saint Kitts and Nevis, like Tanzania, and like Togo and the Comoros. The same flags crop up time and again in loss reports, in detention statistics, and in seafarer abandonment cases.
This is the opposite of a centre of excellence. We should perhaps brand it a cluster of crappiness.
As high quality flags and efficient, modern port states, Singapore and Malaysia should be at the vanguard of clamping down on substandard vessels, which means preventing the next Golden Star 1 trading between their ports.
Just do your job under the PSC regime, please.
