Jag Anand is owned by the Indian company Great Eastern Shipping. Although Great Eastern Shipping hired the crew, it says it cannot allow the ship to leave unilaterally because the ship has been chartered to another company, Cargill, based in Minneapolis. She, in turn, had sub-chartered Jag Anand to another company.
At the other end of the chain are Australian coal buyers at Jag Anand: the Chinese company Tangshan Baichi Trading. It bought the cargo from an Australian supplier, Anglo American. When contacted, Great Eastern Shipping and Cargill said the buyer was responsible for deciding whether Jag Anand could move out of Jingtang port.
“It is the local law that you need to get approval from the port authority to leave, and one of the conditions is that you need approval from the recipient,” said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill’s shipping business. He noted that the receiver could have sold the cargo to third parties, further complicating the approval process.
Two-day calls to contact Tangshan Baichi Trading were not answered.
Anastasia is in a similar situation. He flies the flag of Panama, but is owned by Mediterranean Shipping Switzerland, which leased the ship to Jiangsu Steamship, a Chinese company, officials said. The intended recipient of its coal is E-Commodities Holding, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Each company on the network said it communicated only with one or two other parties with whom it did business directly, and often said they were not sure about the names of the other parties involved. It is a deliberately complicated system, according to Dean Summers of the Australian Maritime Union.
“Everyone points to the person next to them and nobody takes responsibility,” he said.
A week ago, when China’s state-owned Global Times reported that China’s National Development and Reform Commission approved 10 major energy companies to import coal “without release restrictions, except for Australia”, many in Australia interpreted this as formalizing China’s unofficial ban. (The Global Times article was deleted from its website.)