Co-operation for safer shipping lanes
Thursday, 22 March,Captain Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) was invited to MC Northwood to meet with the staff of the NATO Shipping Centre. The purpose of this meeting was to maintain and strengthen the dialogue between the two organisations that work to provide the maritime community with the best information products possible to avoid piracy.
The IMB is based in London and is a specialised division within the Commercial Crimes Services of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). IMB’s primary mission is to protect the integrity of international trade by seeking out fraud and malpractice. One of the IMB’s principal areas of expertise is in the suppression of piracy. Concerned at the alarming growth in the phenomenon, this led to the creation of the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre in 1992, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It maintains a round-the-clock watch on the world’s shipping lanes, reporting pirate attacks to local law enforcement and issuing warnings to shipping about piracy hotspots.
Both Captain Mukundan and Michael Howlett, Divisional Director of the IMB, addressed the Senior Leadership and operational sectors of MC Northwood Headquarters (HQ), NATO, sharing information on how the Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, the Financial Investigation Bureau and the IMB look at trade finance fraud, container crime, charter party fraud, phantom ship fraud and their relationship with the Piracy Reporting Centre and Counter Piracy as a whole. This informative overview provided comprehensive knowledge and background that will no doubt prove to be useful to work being done at this NATO HQ.
The IMB and the NATO Shipping Centre share the same goal: to reduce the impact of piracy by providing sea-farers with timely and comprehensive information on the threat of piracy at sea. Because IMB and the NATO Shipping Centre are part of two quite different organisations (the ICC and NATO) the information they gather is also quite different in nature and in scope. Meetings like these are therefore particularly valuable, allowing both IMB and NATO to complement their understanding of pirate practices and organisation and also to set up a permanent dialogue for information exchange. For example, NATO is providing IMB with its “Daily and weekly updates” and IMB provides NATO with shipping industry facts and figures which would be out of reach without this dialogue.
IMB and the NATO Shipping Centre have agreed to pursue and extend this fruitful relationship and will continue to work together for safer shipping lanes.
Source: NATO
