The ships Athenas and Tina 5 made several deliveries of crude oil without their movements being detected by maritime tracking applications.
14ymedio, Havana, June 13, 2024 — At the beginning of June, experts wondered where the British agency Reuters had obtained the data that allowed it to say that Venezuela had tripled its shipments of crude oil to Cuba in May, compared to the previous month. The answer came in the form of a hypothesis that has yet to be confirmed: two large “ghost” ships, the Athenas and the Tina 5, made several deliveries of Venezuelan crude oil without their movements being detected by maritime tracking applications. There is very little information about these tankers that Caracas uses to send oil to allies such as Cuba. More than discreet, the movements of both ships are invisible, although their sporadic appearances on the radar account for their activity in the Caribbean
Sources for 14ymedio indicate that Venezuela resorted to both ships to transport part of the 70,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil that it sent last month to the Island. They disconnected their transponders to dodge the radar and “transferred their cargo to smaller ships in the bay of Nipe, in the provinces of Holguín and Matanzas,” says an expert who closely follows oil shipments to Cuba.
There is very little information about the tankers that Caracas uses to send oil to allies such as Cuba
However, in the port of Matanzas there were signs of the tankers Primula, the Marianna V.V. and the Caribbean Alliance having docked in the last 30 days, in addition to the tugboat Karadeniz One, which is part of the fleet of Turkish patanas on the Island. This Thursday, the tankers with the Cuban flag Sandino, María Cristina and Alicia were at the terminal. In Nipe, on the other hand, there is no information about the movement of ships, although the tracking applications showed an unidentified tanker in the middle of the bay this Thursday.
The Athenas and the Tina 5 are oil tankers of considerable size. The Tina 5, built in 2002, sails with the flag of Panama. The latest information indicates that it left Trinidad and Tobago for an unknown destination.
As for the Athenas, which sails with the Liberian flag, it was located this Thursday on the northern coast of Venezuela, heading to the port of Scarborough, in Trinidad and Tobago.
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