A shipowner and a betel nut stand: the shady millionaire linked to the death of a Myanmar sailor
A mind-blowing story about a 31-year-old Myanmar man, who fell into the sea off the southern port city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan as he descended a rope ladder on an oil products tanker, caught my eye one evening. As the Coast Guard rescuers pulled him out of the water, both his arms were missing. They were likely cut off by the ladder or the ship propellers under the sea. He was later declared dead at a local hospital.
The victim had just concluded his contract and was ready to return to Myanmar. One report wrote that the victim held his heavy bag of belongings tight, causing him to miss the lifebuoy thrown to him.
As an investigative journalist in Taiwan, I grew curious about the vessel and the unfortunate Myanmar man who lost his life. None of the Taiwanese media indicated any of the ship’s details except its Chinese name.
I wrote up a brief story about this tragedy with a Myanmar Times staff reporter and continued my investigation. As I delved deeper into this foreign-registered ship and its owning companies, two stealth Taiwanese-linked companies came to light.
Taiwanese-linked foreign vessel
The oil products tanker called Hong Ching (IMO: 9062348) sails under the flag of the South Pacific nation of The Cook Islands and belongs to Hong Kong-registered Prosper Success Ltd (IMO: 6136897), the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) GISIS database shows.
It had flown the civil ensign of Sierra Leone, a country on the southwest coast of West Africa, through December 2016 till January 2020. It had also been registered in three other jurisdictions: the Caribbean country of Belize from October 2016, Indonesia from June 2012, and Japan from November 1992.
From the IMO data, the ship looks like a purely foreign vessel. However, the tanker and the ship-owning companies have much closer ties with the island of Taiwan than what is documented on paper.
Prosper Success is controlled by a Taiwanese national, according to Hong Kong’s Companies Registry. It was incorporated less than a year ago in August 2019. The ship was transferred to the current owner on 29 January, and the company owns, operates and manages only one vessel, the IMO database records show.
The only founding director and shareholder of Prosper Success are a Taiwanese national called Chou CT (not his real name). The company has a traditional Chinese name called “shùn-chéng” (舜成). Its share capital amounts to $10,000.
Chou’s residential address in Taiwan points to a betel nut stand in the northern port city of Keelung, according to Google Maps’ street view in May 2019 and December 2015. This is confirmed by my April visit to the site.
The store is around five minutes’ walk away from downtown and located strategically beside a bus stop and across from a provincial highway exit, a gateway into the hilly district of Nuannuan.
The former coal town thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. It has waned and become a commuter town since the depletion of the mines.
This single-story structure with a glass facade is roofed with steel corrugated panels and given shade by arbours. It does not have a building registration, according to the Ministry of Interior’s land administration database. This suggests the building could have been constructed decades ago or without a permit. The shop is not registered either, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ commerce database shows.
Unlike the simple street stalls in Myanmar, in Taiwan betel quid is usually vended by young saleswomen in well-lit glass enclosures with eye-catching neon lighting tubes. It is a popular stimulant among the truck drivers and manual labourers in Taiwan, despite its carcinogenicity. Does a shipowner reside in this austere outlet? Does the store embody a special meaning for him? Is he the ultimate beneficiary?
It is also worth noting that Prosper Success shares the address of its corporate secretarial service provider United LS Management Ltd in Two Chinachem Exchange Square, North Point, Hong Kong. The city is a popular base to establish a company that exists only on paper.
Meeting the owner in the former coal town
I paid a visit to the betel nut stand with a friend on Sunday, 19 April lunchtime. The store was closed. There were two surveillance cameras hung at the two corners under the eaves beside the road. After we took pictures and lingered around the outlet for a while, a man came out from the house beside and confirmed his identity as Chou CT.
The betel nut business is run by his mother, an elderly lady living next to the store. Chou said he had another residence nearby, and a company in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei. He also admitted to running an oil products tanker business, owed by a Hong Kong firm, and of having heard about the February incident. He had to call someone to confirm whether “his friend” could tell me more about the oil products tanker business afterwards.
However, he insisted that Hong Ching did not belong to him and that he had no idea why the records showed his ownership. “Do not trust the news. My ship is not called Hong Ching. The reporters may have got it wrong.”
In regards to the February incident, he said it was impossible the man had been murdered as many others were present at the scene. He heard from “his friend” that the victim had to return to the shore through a tender boat, because of Taiwan’s policies aimed at containing COVID-19. He also said most of the Taiwanese oil products tankers hired Burmese workers through an agent, as no Taiwanese would work under such difficult conditions. It is cheaper to hire a Burmese or Bangladeshi than an Indonesian.
He made several voice-calls through Line Messenger to my friend hours after our visit. Amid one of the calls, he “warned” that wealthy people may be subject to deadly assault in his township, offering to find her a boyfriend. “This place is Nuannuan, not Taipei. If you were a little bit rich, you might drown in the mountains.”
In a later call, he acknowledged he had owned the ship yet denied it again when pressed for more details. He claimed to have sold the ship to a “slaughterhouse”, saying that the ship could have been made into scrap metal by now. He also asked if my friend could help his younger brother develop an online business and sell goods abroad.
Flag of Convenience (FOC)
Registration of a vessel in a country other than the owner’s is a common and contentious business practice called the “Flag of Convenience” (FOC). This norm makes ship-related investigations and litigation complicated.
The highly volatile international shipping industry is a capital-intensive business. The industrial players scour the world for the cheapest and most flexible source of funds. The Flag of Convenience helps the owner to garner greater control over their profits, access to more financial tools, and dodge liabilities related to taxation, labour rights and environmental laws.
The rigid financial regulations of Taiwan may incentivise investors to more business-friendly markets like Hong Kong and The Cayman Islands, Henry Hu, an auditor with experience in Hong Kong and Taiwan, said. For example, Hong Kong imposes fewer restrictions on corporate registration and does not tax the capital gains and offshore profits from vessels, he said.
The practice is even more common among the Taiwanese shipowners because of the island state’s long-time exclusion from international organisations such as The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) until 2001.
The Taiwanese fisheries companies register their ships in smaller or landlocked countries partly to secure fishing quotas set by international regulators, as many of such opportunities are allocated among the national fleets. Such countries are also attractive to the shipowners because of their feeble capability of enforcing the law at sea.
Having to say that, the practice of FOC does not translate immediately into any wrongdoing, despite its provision of a hotbed for irregularities including human-trafficking, malicious over-fishing, and money laundering.
The previous East African owner
Before being transferred to the Hong Kong company, Hong Ching was owned by Yong Da Line Corp Ltd (IMO: 6090168) in Seychelles, a tax haven and archipelagic state off the coast of East Africa in the Indian Ocean.
As you may imagine, it is not likely to be a Seychellois-controlled company.
A lousy website claiming to represent the corporation caught my attention. The site is set against the theatrical background of marine operations and oil product tankers. The long exposure streaks of waves, aerial view of sea ice, and the grand, still vessel together create a captivating ambience.
The text, in contrast, dotted with falsehoods, inconsistencies, and inadequate English-to-traditional Chinese translations.
The company claims to have been listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange since 2010 and was founded in March 2008, whereas no such company can be found in the bourse.
What is the correct way to address this company in Chinese? The website does not even adopt a consistent Chinese translation of the corporate name. It self-identifies as “yong-dá-xiàn” (永達線) thrice and “yong-dà-xiàn” (永大線) once. The two variations even appear in the same paragraph. It also falsely translates “fleet” into motorcade (車隊, chē-duì) in Chinese, although the correct terminology (船隊, chuán-duì) does exist in the same paragraph.
The IMO database registers Yong Da Line in Seychelles’ capital of Victoria without further details like the number and street name, yet this website provides a specific address of its head office in Kaohsiung.
This address corresponds to a shipping company called Yong Da Shipping Management and Consulting Corp Ltd (my translation of “永達船舶管理顧問有限公司”), incorporated in January 2017, Taiwan’s Department of Commerce database shows. An office building hosts it only around one kilometre from the harbour.
The company director had changed four times — once in November 2019, and in March and July 2018 and in April 2019, respectively. The current representative and only director is called Chou MY. The firm’s former representatives were also the sole director during each of their stints.
Hardship at sea
The tragic incident of the Myanmar sailor killed on the ship is a blunt reminder for all of the hardships of working at sea.
There were approximately 300 Myanmar nationals among the total of more than 35,000 hired by the Taiwanese fishing vessels, as of the end of 2019, according to newly released data from Taiwan’s Fisheries Agency.
All these Myanmar marine workers were hired offshore, which means they were not subject to the aegis of Taiwan’s labour and employment laws. The guarantee of their pay, workload, and safety falls in the grey zone, where the workers’ countries of origin, the vessels’ countries of registration, and the Taiwanese government are almost unlikely to intervene.
The human rights situation in Taiwan’s long-distance fishing vessels has been under close scrutiny by the European Union. Taiwan is home to one of the world’s largest fishing fleets by the value and quantity of catch.
The numbers above exclude those hired by FOC or non-fishing vessels controlled by Taiwanese, such as Hong Ching. Nonetheless, it is understood the condition on-board, including meals, residential cabin space, and the intensity of work on oil tankers generally, fares better than that in the fishing vessels. The tankers are usually larger and better-equipped.
The unfortunate Myanmar seafarer would not have known that the world has become a gloomier place as a result of COVID-19. Crew changes are being interrupted because of the tightening immigration policies to contain the virus.
At the time of writing, I received a request for help from several Myanmar nationals trapped in an FOC oil or chemical tanker, where one seaman allegedly died of COVID-19 in February. The vessel was reportedly rejected a crew change in Taiwan before it sailed to China.
I have not heard the news about the deceased Myanmar man through my sources or the Taiwanese media since.
However, I was pleased the first English account of the incident “Myanmar seaman drowns in Taiwan sea accident” had been translated into Burmese through a local seaman’s. Many sent their thoughts and prayers to the Myanmar man through the comments in Burmese.
There are around 60,000 Myanmar seafarers on board and many more working as illegal migrants at sea.
Hong Ching has since sailed west to the Bay of Bengal. Its deadweight tonnage amounts to 4999, making it into the rank of a small tanker. It was built in Japan about three decades ago.
It was last seen in the sea off the Bangladeshi port city of Chittagong on 18 March, according to shipping information service MarineTraffic. The air temperature there was 26 degrees Celsius. The wind blew at 8 knots from the west. (1 knot = 1.9 kilometres per hour).
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The shipowners’ names are anonymised for privacy reasons.
Sandra Tai contributed additional reporting.
Pei-Hua Yu is an independent researcher on Southeast Asian political economy, the globalisation of Chinese corporations, and international development. The story benefits from the peer-to-peer sharing, including Giannina Segnini’s in the “Following Ships, Smugglers & Supply Chains” workshop of The Third Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in 2018.
The story first appeared on The Myanmar Times on 1 May. The version here has been updated with additional background on the Flag of Convenience.
