Fraud Traced To Vanished Ship

THE DISAPPEARANCE of a cargo vessel in good weather off the coast of South Africa had maritime officials confused until a mysterious ship appeared at another African port.

LONDON - The good ship Jahan was last heard from on Christmas Day, when its master sent out a Mayday message saying it was going down off the coast of South Africa, carrying with it 28 seamen and its cargo of sugar bound for Iraq.

For three days the South African air force scoured the seas and found nothing - no life rafts, no flotsam, no nothing - which surprised searchers because the weather was fine, the seas calm. Somewhat bewildered, they abandoned the search.

The Jahan was gone.

But, it turned out, it was gone in name only.

Somewhere along the line, according to the International Maritime Bureau here, which investigates frauds at sea, the name of the 15,000-ton vessel was changed to the Zalcosea II, and it then put in at the port of Tema, Ghana, where its master tried to sell the $3.5 million cargo.

Investigators for the bureau, a division of the International Chamber of Commerce, found it in Tema on Jan. 3. The ship, the master and the crew are under naval guard as authorities investigate what the bureau believes is yet another "phantom ship" fraud.

There are five or six of these each year, said P. Mukundan, director of the bureau, but few as brazen as the Jahan. "They come and load cargo" under one name, change the name and "then disappear

and sell it somewhere else. . . ."

Usually, they don't claim to be sinking - the sort of message that can set off a high-profile search. They say they have engine problems or delays in their voyage, Mukundan said. "They buy time," he said, while attempting to peddle a cargo.

The particulars of the Jahan - or the Zalcosea II - are common in the world of shipping. The ship is owned by a company in Panama, registered in Belize, managed by Seatimes Shipping of Singapore, and manned by a master from Ghana and a crew of Bangladeshis, Indians and Burmese.

Its voyage began Dec. 9 in Santos, Brazil, where it reportedly picked up a load of sugar to be sold to Iraq. Using its satellite telex, it messaged its owner on Dec. 23 that all was well and the ship was steaming past Cape Town on its way to Iraq, Mukundan said.

The next message came 15 minutes before midnight on Christmas: The Jahan was in trouble 600 miles off the coast of South Africa. The next few days were filled with stories about the search for survivors.

But officials were mystified at not seeing anything, at not receiving any signals from emergency beacons, at the fact that the seas were so calm.

There was no question that the Jahan had vanished. Lloyd's List, the London-based newspaper of the shipping industry, editorialized on Jan. 8 about a French yachtsman being rescued near Antarctica while "an entire crew of 28 men had vanished after apparently evacuating a large commercial ship in reasonable weather in the South Atlantic."

This week, Lloyd's List quoted the ship's operator, Seatimes Shipping of Singapore, as claiming to have been the victim of "a Ghanaian syndicate which aimed to sell off the cargo" before giving the ship yet another new name.

Mukundan said such schemes are hatched because sellers of cargo get "desperate." The seller of a commodity has signed a contract to get the goods to a particular place at a particular time. If he fails, he can lose the deal and the money. If he gets the cargo off his hands on time, he cashes his letter of credit right away, receives his payment and the responsibility shifts to someone else, in this case the shipping company.

In the case of the Jahan, the alleged perpetrators made a fateful mistake. In renaming the ship, they chose a name it had once used, Zalcosea. Once a ship by that name was reported in Ghana, it was a simple matter for the bureau to check its records and see its history of name changes and to determine that the Zalcosea II was, in fact, the Jahan.