Drug traffickers use Polish-flagged yachts to transport drugs across the Atlantic Ocean

Criminals are using Polish-flagged yachts to export cocaine and other drugs across the Atlantic Ocean from South America to Europe and elsewhere, the UN and maritime authorities have warned.

Drug traffickers are exploiting a legal loophole that gives Polish ships “de facto immunity” from arrest in international waters, according to Julien Garsany, representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Brussels.

“When other countries see a ship sailing under the Polish flag and suspect it of being involved in drug trafficking, they basically have no one to give them permission to board,” Garsany said.

The UN has long been concerned about ships flying flags that have nothing to do with the ship’s owner. These are so-called flags of convenience that can help smugglers evade surveillance at sea.

Poland is the latest flag in fashion for criminals, according to maritime law enforcement agencies, who are exploiting the rush of British and other boat owners to take advantage of the EU country’s cheap registration system for small sailing yachts and other boats up to 24 metres long.

The Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre for Narcotics (MAOC-N), a joint US-UK-European drug trafficking operational centre based in Lisbon and focused mainly on smaller vessels, has registered an increase in the number of Polish-flagged pleasure boats suspected of transporting drugs since 2021.

While MAOC-N monitored 12 Polish-flagged vessels in 2021 that were potentially linked to human trafficking, that number rose to 31 in 2022 and to 47 last year. Boats appear on the organization’s radar due to intelligence tips, ongoing investigations and suspicious movements of vessels or crew members.

“If you are a smuggler, you want to… get through with as few obstacles as possible. And a flag from a European member state normally doesn’t attract much attention, especially in the Atlantic Ocean,” Garsany said.

Poland launched a new EU-funded boat registration system for vessels up to 24m in 2020. Boat registrations have risen from around 2,000 initially to almost 77,000 so far, with just over a third of owners listing an address outside Poland, Polish authorities said.

“It’s cheap, it’s super fast, it doesn’t require a lot of information, so of course criminals will try to register on that,” said an analyst at MAOC-N. “It’s a fantastic business.”

According to MAOC-N and UNODC, criminals may be taking advantage of Poland’s failure to properly implement international rules that allow other countries to board Polish-flagged vessels at sea. This has meant that suspected drug smugglers have been able to escape, provided they do not enter the territorial waters of the enforcing country.

For example, two years ago, Portuguese authorities searched a Polish-flagged ship off the coast of the Azores, arresting two Dutch nationals and seizing 1.2 tons of cocaine.

A Portuguese judge later ruled that the operation was unlawful because Poland had not given its consent. Although a court overturned that decision earlier this year, Portuguese media reported that the two suspects had since been released and left Portugal, thus avoiding prosecution.

The Polish police’s Central Investigation Bureau, which is supposed to issue permits for boarding ships, is currently unable to do so because a recent amendment to drug legislation has not yet entered into force, according to the Polish Ministry of Health, which is responsible for implementing the UN Convention against Drug Trafficking.

Numerous websites offer Polish yacht registrations for prices starting from €395, and some also offer to name a UK or Delaware company as the owner of the boat. This allows customers to effectively hide their identity when registering.

Since the introduction of the new registration system, the number of seizures of Polish-flagged boats transporting cocaine and other drugs has increased.

MAOC-N has reported 19 seizures of small Polish vessels, most of them from 2021 onwards. Law enforcement officers have seized more than 18 tonnes of cannabis, 13.5 tonnes of cocaine and 56 kg of MDMA (ecstasy) from yachts and motorboats flying the Polish flag, including off the coasts of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

“What we saw a number of years ago is a huge movement of cocaine from South America to West Africa… because the criminals know that it is easier for us to target them if they go directly to Europe,” the MAOC-N analyst said, adding that ships sailing from West Africa to Europe may be less frequently checked for narcotics than ships coming directly from South America.

While the Polish flag is now mainly popular for small vessels, other flags have been used in the past, such as those of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, MAOC-N said. The Netherlands changed its rules on boat certificates in 2021 following revelations that they had been used by drug traffickers.”

The Polish Ministry of Infrastructure said it was aware of reports of “incidents of drug trafficking on board (yachts) flying the Polish flag” but that it had “no information about the involvement of organised criminal groups in these incidents”.

It also said that “given the number of vessels on the register – over 70,000 – this is not a large scale.” The ministry promised to investigate the drug trafficking issue raised by the Financial Times, but was “not aware of any concerns from international law enforcement authorities” at this stage.

Poland’s Health Ministry said Warsaw hopes to allow inspections of Polish-flagged boats by the end of the year. “The competent authorities in Poland are working on amendments to the law . . . that will allow them (police) to issue such permits,” the ministry said.