US sanctions Indian network accused of selling false flags to Iran's shadow fleet
Treasury says the Chandigarh couple behind it impersonated registries from Eswatini to Timor-Leste for more than a decade
The US Treasury has sanctioned an India-based network that it says sold fraudulent ship registrations and certificates to tankers carrying Iranian oil, including ships working for Iran's military and its proxies. The designations of 4 November name Suniel Kumar Sharma, his wife Jaspreet Preeti Shahid, Ashwani Kumar Dhiman and Ishwinder Singh, together with nine associated entities, under the Treasury's announcement in its Operation Economic Outcast campaign.
How did the registries work?
Treasury says the network bought web domains and built websites offering ship registration, seafarer certification and classification services in the name of countries that had never authorised it. The activity dates back to at least 2014, when Sharma and Shahid tried to impersonate Dominica's flag authority. Later sites used the names of Aruba, Guyana, Mali, Mozambique, Malawi, Sint Maarten and Timor-Leste. Treasury says the network first offered legitimate flagging for Dominica, Guyana, Eswatini and Nicaragua, and kept flagging ships after those states cut ties and publicly denounced the registries as fraudulent.
In 2023 Sharma set up the Singapore-based Eswatini Maritime Affairs and International Ship Registry, which kept registering tankers after Eswatini's authorities disowned it. Its customers included the sanctioned crude tanker Ping Shun. US forces seized Majestic X, formerly Phonix, in April 2026 while she was carrying Iranian oil under a false Guyanese flag. Through Oceaniek Technologies India, Sharma also set up purported registries for Aruba, Nicaragua and Sint Maarten, which gave false flags to the sanctioned Lattafa, Binary Star and Vera. Dhiman and Singh are listed as nominal directors of companies including Aryavart Ship Management, while Shahid increasingly took over management.
What does OFAC want the industry to check?
Alongside the designations, OFAC published an alert on the shadow fleet's reliance on false flags. It tells owners, insurers and banks to check registration documents and to treat discrepancies between a ship's claimed flag and the country code in its MMSI as a warning sign. A flag that does not appear in maritime databases, or papers that cannot be verified, are listed as red flags. Treasury warns that falsely flagged ships carry no valid protection and indemnity insurance, which creates a risk of major environmental and economic damage in the waters where they trade.
The scale is not small. In April the IMO recorded 529 ships falsely flying national flags over the previous year, affecting nearly 40 member states. Iran's own blacklist shows the same pattern: on 5 November its strait authority removed the LPG carrier SOGL, which flies a false Comoros flag, together with Gas Marakua, both of them sanctioned by OFAC on 8 October.
This story is part of the Maritime Briefing of 9 November 2026.
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