The Iran navy's new deadly warship Makran, a former aframax tanker, is not the first Iranian warship converted from a clandestinely acquired foreign merchant vessel.

The precedent was set in November 2020 when a former Italian ro-ro, the 8,700-gt Altinia (built 1992), emerged from an Iranian shipyard as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy’s multipurpose heavy combat warship IRIS Shahid Roudaki.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy is part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is completely separate from Iran's regular navy, which owns the Makran.

Blanket ban

Given the blanket ban by many countries on selling any military hardware to Iran, Italian parliamentarians were in an uproar when the identity of the IRIS Shahid Roudaki was revealed by eagle-eyed shipping analysts.

That their ship would eventually end up with an Iranian military organisation was probably the last thing on the mind of the executives at Visentini Giovanni Transporti when the Altinia was sold for $2m in May 2019 to a Marshall Islands-registered entity called Galaxy Ferry Shipping.

It was another Marshall Islands single-ship entity — Ha Marine Co — that bought the former Altinia off Galaxy Ferry in June 2020, which turned out to be a front for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy.

Galaxy Ferry was also unlikely to have given much thought to who was buying the ship.

It is very common for ownership of older ro-ros and ropaxes to pass frequently between obscure companies that deploy them — quite legally — in the more marginal Mediterranean and Red Sea trades. Iran is not exactly a prolific buyer of the ship types.

The opaqueness of companies registered in offshore tax havens makes it almost impossible for small shipowners that do not have the resources of a government intelligence agency to find out who is behind the purchase.

Due diligence

While these two vessels are the only ones known to have directly ended up as part of the Iranian military inventory, many tankers have in the past been clandestinely acquired by obscure offshore companies that have turned out to be fronts for entities with ties to the Iranian oil sector.

Even large shipowners were caught out in the past and faced official castigation, despite claiming their due diligence checks had not raised any flags warning the buyers had links with Iran.

These purchases have highlighted just how easy the non-transparent nature of shipping makes it for anyone to buy a ship despite the best intentions of the seller.