Houthis agreed with the United Nations over deal regarding the FSO Safer threatening to spill 1.1 million barrels of crude oil off Yemen’s coast.
According to Reuters, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said last month that there was an agreement in principle to shift the oil from the tanker Safer to another ship.
The Safer has been stranded off Yemen’s Red Sea oil terminal of Ras Issa for more than six years, with U.N. officials having warned that it could spill four times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska.
Now, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthi supreme revolutionary committee, informed that:
A memorandum of understanding has been signed with the United Nations for the Safer tanker
The Houthis, who are battling Yemen’s internationally recognised government, control the area where the tanker is moored and the national oil firm that owns it.
A deal had previously been reached for a technical U.N. team to inspect the deteriorating vessel, built in 1976, and conduct whatever repairs may be feasible, but final agreement on logistical arrangements did not materialise.
Since 2015, no maintenance operations have been carried out, when a Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen against the Iran-aligned Houthis after they ousted the internationally recognised government from the capital, Sanaa.
Moreover, as part of United Nations-coordinated efforts to address the risk of an oil spill from the FSO SAFER moored off the coast of Yemen, IMO and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Yemen are supporting contingency planning workshops to strengthen Yemen’s oil spill response capability.
Keep all ships owners, filling the FSO Safer, responsibel for what happens with their oil !