Mystery still surrounds the seizure by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of the Marshall Island-flagged 73,000 dwt oil tanker MV Talara (IMO 9569994). The ship was seized 22 miles off the coast of Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates on November 14, and was quickly taken out of the Emirati EEZ area into that belonging to Iran.
Mehr News carried an IRGC statement that the seizure was “in line with safeguarding the interests and resources of the Iranian nation,” suggesting by reference to the safeguarding of resources that the seizure could have been an anti-smuggling operation. The IRGC’s own X account posted a statement that “whoever has aggressed against you, aggress against him like he has aggressed against you,” not linking it directly to the seizure but suggesting it could have been a retaliatory action.
The Talara is owned by Pasha Finance Inc., a subsidiary of the Pasha Group, which has been thoroughly Californian for three generations (and with no known connections to the Pasha Group associated with the family of the President of Azerbaijan). The ship is managed by Columbia Ship Management, a Cyprus-registered company owned by long-term Cypriot resident Captain Heinrich Leopold Felix Schoeller, a member of an aristocratic Austro-Czech dynasty. The antecedents of both owner and management makes it extremely unlikely that the ship had hidden Israeli owners, which could have served as an IRGC excuse for seizing the vessel.
One of two reasons, or a combination of the two, could be behind the seizure.
The first possibility is a counter-smuggling operation. Iran has long conducted “law enforcement” operations to clamp down on oil smuggling, which Iran could classify as resource theft. Most of the Talara’s movements in the last two years have been trips within the Gulf area and to India, with one trip to Brazil. The ship last visited Singapore in 2020. Nonetheless, the pattern of Talara’s activity observed, and the size of the tanker, is generally inconsistent with regional oil smuggling activity, although the Fars news agency later said that those suspected of criminal activity which precipitated the interception were Iranian nationals.
The second – which would irritate the IRGC, and provoke their retaliation – would have been the loss of the tanker Falcon and its valuable cargo of LPG on October 18. Falcon was loaded in Iran’s Assaluyeh shipment terminal and was under way to the Houthi-controlled port of Ras Isa.
TankerTrackers.com reported at the time that the MV Falcon was part of the Iranian shadow fleet and noted that it had no known insurer. Without any need to do so, the Iranian National Tanker Company took the unusual step of denying that it owned or controlled the ship, suggesting in fact that it did.
The reluctance of navies who had assisted with the rescue of the surviving crew members of the MV Falcon to comment on first reports of a missile attack, and then of an accident, fueled speculation at the time that the LPG shipment could have been attacked by one of a number of parties who are opposed to Iran and the Houthis. This would have been consistent with an attack mounted a month earlier on September 16, when Israel had launched an attack on the Pakistani-crewed MV Clipper (IMO 9102198), which was delivering LPG to the Houthi-owned terminal at Ras Isa.
If both factors contributed to the IRGC’s decision to conduct the interception of the Talara, it would be a seizure of a cargo of equivalent value, at the expense of the parties (or their allies) they believe were responsible for the attack carried out on the Falcon. The crew of the Talara are likely to be released quickly, but not the value of its 30,000-ton cargo.
The Iranian action also suggests that hardliners within the IRGC still retain the authority to undertake politically-provocative actions, even at a delicate time when opinions are sharply divided within Iran’s ruling elite on how to respond to the evident weakness and unpopularity of the regime.
In recent days, the regime’s fragility has been particularly exposed by President Masoud Pezeshkian’s astonishing statement that Tehran may have to be evacuated within the next two weeks if there is no rainfall (none is forecast for the next two weeks), and by the willingness of two uniformed Army officers to sacrifice themselves to likely death by displaying the Iranian flag used during the rule of the Pahlavis. The IRGC’s petulance in seizing Talara is a reminder that rash actions on their part could at any time threaten the maritime community.
Reference : Mystery Surrounds Iran’s Seizure of Tanker in Gulf of Oman