In the winter of 2008 he flew from Ulan Bator to Berlin and from there on to Oslo. He didn’t know much about the Norwegian capital, but managed to find his way to the university, where he presented his wish to become a student. Preferably within the tourism and travel industry, he said.
The only documents he had with him were a diploma from a hotel management vocational school in Singapore and a tourist visa. After having received a polite rejection and advice to apply through ordinary channels, he travelled on to Sweden and the University of Uppsala. There too his attempts at acquiring acceptance as a student were unsuccessful.
Back in Mongolia he gave up on his dreams of higher education and found a job in the Ministry of Transport, where eventually he was appointed ship’s registrar at the Mongolia Ship Registry – the ship registry of a country located 1,300 kilometres from the closest port. The registry was the idea of Mongolia’s Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar and was to give its clients “excellence in registry and marine services”. What he did was to rent out Mongolia’s sovereignty to a private company, allegedly to procure revenues for the country’s treasury. He appointed his daughter as head of the office. Since few ship owners wanted to travel to the edge of the Gobi Desert to register their ships, the Mongolian ship registry was based in Singapore.
When Tamir Lkhagvademberel arrived at the ship registry’s austere offices in Singapore’s Chinatown, one of his first tasks was to register the fishing vessel the Kuko. In the registration papers, the old Vesturvon has undergone an impossible transformation: the ship was no longer built in Ulsteinvik in Norway in 1969, but rather in northern Spain 20 years later. On paper the hull is two metres shorter and five tons heavier. While the ship is registered in Mongolia, it is also listed in the Nigerian ships register under the more well-known name of the Thunder. The ship owner in Galicia had secured two sets of papers. For him it was a perfect system, while for the authorities who were trying to follow the ship’s pillaging missions in Antarctica, it was a nightmare.
Tamir Lkhagvademberel has no reasonable explanation for how so much could go wrong at the same time.
From the ministry in Ulan Bator, he has been told to use the meeting to create a better impression of the ship registry. A few years ago the registry’s director was caught cheating at a casino in Florida. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The country was accused of having registered anything that would float at a low cost. Mongolia-registered ships were constantly being seized or were mixed up in life-threatening or fatal accidents.
Before Mongolia started selling its flag, the ships register of Cambodia was the preferred banner of international criminals. The register was owned by the private company Sovereign Ventures, which had close ties with North Korea. After several episodes involving ships smuggling narcotics and weapons, Cambodia was forced to shut down its register. Sovereign Ventures bought its way into the Mongolia registry instead, which was quickly suspected of hiding North Korean and Iranian ships in violation of the international sanctions regime. Before long the Mongolian shipping escapade came to be viewed as a serious security threat.
“Mongolia appears to have no problem renting out its flag to weapons proliferators, criminals and other shady figures who endanger the security of the United States and its allies,” Director Peter Pham wrote in an analysis for the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs.1
“We had no experience with shipping; this was a first step towards the maritime industry. Some of the ships we registered became a headache for us. The USA and NATO pressured us to get rid of the North Korean ships and we also threw out agents who worked with blacklisted ships. We had to do something about our reputation,” Tamir Lkhagvademberel says.
The pirate vessels’ owners paid USD 3,000 to sail under the Mongolian flag. Nonetheless, the registry’s sales volume did not exceed 1 million dollars in 2015, according to Lkhagvademberel. That is barely enough for payroll, rent and living expenses in one of the most expensive cities in the world. If they are not earning money on it, why does Mongolia have a ship registry?
“Mongolia wants to become a shipping nation. We hope that more Mongolians will purchase their own ships in the course of the next few years,” is Lkhagvademberel’s attempted explanation.
Under pressure from Australia, Lkhagvademberel removed the Thunder and the other fishing vessels from its registry.
The ship registry’s financial director, the company’s only woman, is explicitly sceptical about the meeting.
“Why are we actually sitting here and talking to you?” she asks.
Five silent men look up from their plates and wait for an answer.
We drive to the offices of the ship registry in Chinatown. At the office the director has an equestrian statue of Djengis Khan.
“We once had the largest fleet in the world,” he says.
Even by the loosest of definitions, it must be admitted that it has been a long time since Mongolia was a shipping superpower. In the thirteenth century the Mongolian fleet was wiped out by a typhoon in an attempt to invade Japan. More than 4,000 ships and 100,000 soldiers are said to have disappeared.
In Mongolia the Thunder operated with three different identities. The ship was registered under the name the Wuhan No. 4 in July 2012. According to Lkhagvademberel, the registration of the Wuhan was made possible by a disloyal servant at the registry, who gave the Thunder’s owner what he needed in the way of papers, stamps and signatures without registering the ship in the official registry. What is odd about the ship’s certificates that Lkhagvademberel gives us as documentation for the Thunder’s two Mongolian identities – the Kuko and the Wuhan No.
