The US government has removed a ship and its one-time owner from its list of sanctioned entities.
Marshall Islands-registered Monsoon Navigation Corp and the 106,200-dwt aframax Oceano (built 1994) are off the blacklist maintained by the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (Ofac), the agency said Monday.
The two were sanctioned in May, when the tanker was called the Ocean Elegance, on accusations of shipping oil from Venezuela to Cuba this year and in 2018 amid a broader US crackdown against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's regime over the summer.
The aframax tanker, according to shipping databases, is now called the Oceano and has been owned and managed by Panama-based Fainan Investments since April.
Prior to that, its listed owner was Monsoon from September 2008. The company appears to own no other ships.
Little information is publicly available about either Monsoon or Fainan Investments.
According to automatic identification system (AIS) data from VesselsValue, the ship had called on Venezuelan and Cuban ports as early as 2012.
Its last voyage involving either country was purportedly between 16 and 21 March, when the ship called on Amuay Bay, home to Venezuela's largest oil refinery.
The vessel does not appear to have been active since it was placed on the sanctions list.
Since the end of May, satellite tracking data from Bloomberg shows that the Oceano has remained in the vicinity of Trinidad & Tobago.
London-based Lloyd's Register pulled its classification of the vessel in May. It switched to the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping, but that classification has been suspended as a result of an overdue survey.
According to legal and industry sources, the US has been increasingly turning its eye toward shipping, using AIS data to track ships and warning insurers, financiers and others connected to ships that they could be the target of enforcement if the ships are caught engaging in illicit business.
Eric Martin contributed to this story.
