United Nations Security Council sounds alarm on Libya-Malta fuel smuggling racket

The United Nations Security Council on Friday passed a new resolution on the smuggling of refined fuel from Libya, a practice in which Maltese smugglers have been implicated for years.

The resolution comes after a report by UN investigators earlier this month said “vessels showing suspicious navigational patterns” off the Libyan coastal city of Zuwara are continuing to be observed.

In their request for to the UNSC to ramp up its resolution on crude oil and extend its provisions to refined fuels, UN investigators also cited an attempt to illicitly export 11,500 metric tons of heavy fuel oil from eastern Libya to Malta last February.

According to investigators, imported fuel that is priced lower for the domestic Libyan market is being smuggled by ship from western Libya to Malta, Italy and Turkey.

Acting on the investigators’ advice to extend sanctions already in place for crude oil, the UNSC on Friday passed a resolution designed to make explicit that fuel smuggling is illegal, so that smuggling vessels “can be identified, blacklisted, and prevented from disembarking their cargo,” a senior Western diplomat was quoted saying.

It expands on a 2014 resolution banning illicit crude oil exports from Libya, authorising the inspection of suspect ships, and calling on member states to take measures necessary to block the illicit export of subsided Libyan fuel, a practice which is being described as rampant.

Those measures “shall apply with respect to vessels loading, transporting, or discharging petroleum, including crude oil and refined petroleum products, illicitly exported or attempted to be exported from Libya,” the new resolution states.

Libya is a major oil producer and exporter, but it has limited refining capacity.

Fuel smuggling is said to be concentrated around the western towns of Zawiya and Zuwara, and across Libya’s western land border with Tunisia.

Both the Zawiya branch of Libya’s Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG) and the local coastguard have been accused of involvement in fuel smuggling, which, according to the UN investigators, overlaps with lucrative smuggling of migrants from Libya to Italy.

The unnamed Western diplomat said the new resolution was not expected to halt smuggling and that its application would depend on how the UN-backed government in Tripoli, which requested the reference to refined products, chose to use it.

“The only thing that will stop smuggling is the removal of the subsidies,” the diplomat is quoted as saying.

Last January, Libya launched a large investigation into the racket and said that fuel smuggling from Libya to Malta, Italy, Cyprus and Greece has cost the country half a billion dollars.

In March of last year, UN experts had reported that fuel was being smuggled out of Libya, transferred from ship to ship at sea and brought to Malta. A Maltese company had been implicated in the racket.

The UN had reported how ships from Malta would disable their automated identification system tracking systems and sail south to within some 50 nautical miles from the Libyan coast, where they would take on Libyan fuel. After that they return to just outside Maltese waters and transfer their illicit cargoes to other ships which would then bring the fuel to Malta.

The UN had reported how ships from Malta would disable their automated identification system tracking systems and sail south to within some 50 nautical miles from the Libyan coast, where they would take on Libyan fuel