Venezuela sanctions

US blocks air cargo flights with aid for Cuba

A small propeller-driven cargo plane comes in for landing with wheels down against bright blue sky.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has denied requests from two small air charter companies in South Florida for exemptions to a recent embargo on nonscheduled cargo flights to Cuba. The decision underscores the raw political emotions regarding the Cuban regime, but also how businesses use the regulatory process to maintain competitive advantage.

The suspension of charter operations is the latest effort by the Trump administration to squeeze the Havana government over its human rights record...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/us-blocks-air-cargo-flights-with-aid-for-cuba

Hormuz tanker risk rises after US seizes Iranian cargoes

product tanker

Tanker rates spiked last year after attacks on tankers in the Middle East. Could history repeat itself? The U.S. has just seized four Iranian petroleum cargoes, adding more fuel to rising tensions at the Strait of Hormuz, where a quarter of the world’s oil transits.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed Friday that “with the assistance of foreign partners,” it seized the gasoline cargoes aboard four Liberian-flagged, Greek-managed product tankers: the Bella, Bering, Pandi and Luna.

The...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/hormuz-tanker-risk-rises-after-us-seizes-iranian-cargoes

Will Venezuela sanctions spark another tanker spike?

crude tanker

Tanker owners have a love-hate relationship with U.S. sanctions. On one hand, sanctions can pull perfectly good fleet capacity from the market, causing spot rates to skyrocket. On the other, your own perfectly good fleet capacity can get pulled from the market.

What’s unnerving to tanker owners about U.S. sanctions is their apparent randomness: some ships get hit, others that perform the exact same voyages do not. It calls to mind the famous Shirley Jackson story, “The Lottery,” in which a...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/will-venezuela-sanctions-spark-another-tanker-spike

Q&A: Inside the high-stakes world of clandestine crude shipping

crude tanker

There are companies that spend tens of millions of dollars and deploy vast amounts of computer power to track the world’s tanker fleet, using automation and scalability to distill intelligence from ship movements.

And then there’s TankerTrackers.com, which has garnered more headlines than all the rest.

TankerTrackers.com is the antithesis of scalability – a small team of amateur sleuths, more Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew than HAL 9000, more likely to be hunched in the dark trying to identify a...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/qa-inside-the-high-stakes-world-of-clandestine-crude-shipping

US sanctions target Greek tankers loaded with Venezuelan crude

crude tanker

U.S. sanctions had a huge impact on crude-tanker supply and spot rates in 2019, when the tankers of China’s COSCO (Dalian) were sidelined after carrying Iranian crude.

Will it happen again in 2020?

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced Tuesday that it had sanctioned four tankers and their operating companies because they loaded crude oil for export in Venezuela.

These include two very large crude carriers (VLCCs; tankers that carry 2 million barrels of crude...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/us-targets-greek-tankers-carrying-venezuelan-crude

+ More