Kanikosen reads the registers that states, regional fisheries bodies, and international organisations publish about fishing vessels, and holds what each of them says about a hull side by side. For every vessel it tracks the companies formally linked to it: the registered owner, the operator, and the manager. Where the record allows, it also holds the group beneficial owners behind the registered owner, meaning the companies or people who ultimately control it.

That last part is the hard one, and it is the reason this newsletter exists. A registered owner is very often not the ultimate owner, and there is nothing improper in that. Fleets are held through subsidiaries and single-ship companies for tax, financing, and liability reasons that have nothing to do with fishing. The question is not whether the first company you find is the real one. It is whether the public record lets you get from that company to the one standing behind it.

This issue follows three fleets across three coasts to see how far that trail runs. In Zanzibar, a company we knew from last issue as the new owner of two hulls turns out to own seven, all of them reflagged out of Vanuatu in the same month. In the Basque Country, a tuna company was sold to a larger rival this week, and the five vessels in the deal are registered to three different companies, in Spain, Belize, and the Seychelles. And in Ghana, four industrial trawlers have had their licences suspended without being named, five years into a European Union yellow card over illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

Sometimes the trail runs all the way. Sometimes the beneficial owner field is blank, and it stops at the first company. A blank field is not evidence that anyone has done anything wrong, and we say so in each of the three cases below. What it does mean is that from outside, with the public record alone, there is no way to answer the question.

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Seven hulls left Vanuatu for Zanzibar in one month, and the box is empty

One company, seven vessels, three roles apiece, and nobody recorded behind it. Its whole address is two words.

We had two IMO numbers from last issue, 1120754 and 1127166, reported as BAO FENG and BAO WIN, and a company: East Africa Fishery Co Ltd of Zanzibar, holding IMO company number 0440812. Searching the identity register on the company number rather than the vessel returns seven hulls.

Six are 1,382 GT fishing vessels delivered in September and October 2025 and registered in Vanuatu on delivery: BAO FENG (1120754), BAO CHUAN (1120778), HAI XING 1 (1123976), HAI XING 2 (1124009), BAO WIN (1127166), and BAO YU (1127178). The seventh is PIONEER 68 (8469355), 825 GT, built 2019. All seven are now flagged Zanzibar, in the United Republic of Tanzania, and all seven changed flag in March 2026. The register gives six of them an effective date of 1 March and BAO FENG 23 March; it renders month-only dates as the first of the month, so for the six the reliable statement is the month rather than the day.

A hull changing flag is nothing. A whole fleet changing flag inside one month, five months into the working life of most of it, is a decision taken about the fleet and not about any vessel in it. It also corrects our own undercount: last issue we noted Infobae's report of three vessels leaving Vanuatu for Tanzania (11 April 2026), said we could account for two, and declined to guess at the third. We were looking up hulls when we should have been looking up the company.

We are not going to reconstruct the fleet's origin out of vessel names. The scale and flagging of the Chinese distant water fleet is the subject of our own research, China's distant-water fishing fleet: scale, impact and governance, by Miren Gutierrez, Alfonso Daniels, Guy Jobbins, Guillermo Gutierrez Almazor, and César Montenegro (ODI, 2 June 2020), which counted 16,966 vessels and found almost 1,000 of them registered in countries other than China. Seven more in Zanzibar is the pattern rather than an exception to it.

What the register adds is one hull with a past. PIONEER 68 was named Lu Rong Yu 7558 and flew China's flag from November 2019, became PIONEER 68 under Vanuatu's flag in January 2025, and joined the others on the Zanzibar register in March 2026. Chinese fishing vessel names of that form carry the home port: Lu is Shandong province, Rong is the city of Rongcheng. Readers of last issue will know Rongcheng. It is where Shandong Lidao Oceanic, registered owner of LU RONG YUAN YU 138 (IMO 9730476) since October 2013, has its address.

The register also records, for each company, how many ships it owns, how many it operates, how many it manages, and how many group beneficial owners it has. East Africa Fishery Co Ltd owns, operates, and manages all seven hulls itself. Behind it, the register records nobody. Its whole registered address is "Zanzibar, Tanzania.", with no street, no building, and no post code.

That last figure is not blank for everyone. Three Chinese-flagged fish carriers of 5,504 GT, looked up the same afternoon, belong to Shandong Shengrun Shipping Co Ltd, IMO company 0117193: BAO DA (IMO 1126801), BAO CHUN (1135101), and BAO QIU (1135113). That company gives its address as Room 3, Block B1, 418 Huanghai Beilu, Shidaozhen, Rongcheng, and it records four group beneficial owners. Rongcheng is the second time that city has come up in two paragraphs, and we should say plainly that it means nothing on its own: Shandong Lidao Oceanic and Shandong Shengrun Shipping share no record with each other, only a home port.

None of that is an offence and we are not suggesting it is. Argentina logged the track it penalised on 10 January 2026 (iProfesional, 30 July 2026), and East Africa Fishery's ownership takes effect on 1 March for BAO WIN and 23 March for BAO FENG, well after. The company has not been accused by anyone, and the register shows all seven hulls and the owner as not on the United Nations sanctions list. The point is narrower: if you wanted to know who is behind these seven vessels, the register has the question and does not have the answer.

None of the seven appeared in the fishery registers we carry as at 7 August 2026, which is the same lag we described last issue, seen from the receiving end. Of the vessels we hold under Tanzania's flag on that date, not one has a build year later than 2023.

That gap is not permanent. Every particulars record we read for this issue was captured against its source in the same way any other register enters our data, so the seven hulls and East Africa Fishery Co Ltd are queued to enter it. The lag is a real property of fishery registers rather than a fact about the vessels, and the way you get round it is to go to the identity register and read it.

Search the fleet by name, meanwhile, and you get four vessels, all of them different ships. BAO WIN returns IMO 7360320, Belize-flagged and built in France in 1975, and IMO 9109263, the 1994 Panama reefer we untangled last issue. HAI XING 1 returns IMO 8776382 and IMO 8776497, both built in China in 2012 and both 1,491 GT.

That second pair is not a stale record. The register gives IMO 8776382 the name HAI XING 1 from April 2012 and it has held it since, so two vessels currently answer to that name: a 2012 Chinese hull of 1,491 GT and a 2025 Zanzibar hull of 1,382 GT. Last issue we found three hulls sharing the name BAO WIN. Name collisions of this kind are ordinary, and they are the reason a name is not an identifier.

Follow those two Chinese hulls one step further and the owner runs out. Since May 2023 the registered owner of both has been "Rptd Sold Undisclosed Interest", with the country recorded as Unknown and the address recorded as Unknown.

That is not a company. It is what the register writes when a ship has been reported sold and the buyer has not been disclosed, and it has been given a company number, 9991942, so that the owner field is never left blank. The same words sit in the owner field of 6,966 vessels, the operator field of 6,970, and the manager field of 6,967. Those hulls are not a fleet and have nothing to do with one another. What they share is that nobody has recorded who bought them.

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Five tuna vessels changed hands this week. Three companies had to sign.

Two of the three are offshore, and both are registered at the address of the third, on an industrial estate in Bermeo.

A tuna company in Bermeo ran out of money and sold its five remaining vessels to a larger rival. That is an accurate account of the deal. It is also one company selling another company's boats, because four of the five belong to somebody else.

Faro de Vigo reported on 5 August 2026 that Atuneros Congeladores y Transportes Frigoríficos SA, Atunsa, had formalised the purchase of the company the paper calls Pesquería Vasco Montañesa, and the register calls Pesquera Vasco-Montañesa SA, founded in November 1961 and known throughout as Pevasa. With it go the five vessels it had held on to: Playa de Ris, Playa de Azkorri, Playa de Anzoras, Playa de Laida, and Playa de Laga. Pevasa's 2025 accounts show a loss of more than 13 million euros on revenue down 13 per cent to 52.11 million, against a restructuring plan that had projected a profit, and the paper reports the company in general suspension of payments to suppliers. The price has not been disclosed.

Only one of the five is Pevasa's. Playa de Ris (IMO 9684548), 2,591 GT, built 2014 and Spanish-flagged since June that year, is registered to Pesquera Vasco-Montañesa SA, IMO company number 0388938, at Polígono Landabaso, Bermeo. Across the whole register Pevasa is registered owner of one ship, operator of eight, and manager of eight.

Playa de Azkorri (9476111), 2,548 GT, built 2009 and Seychelles-flagged since February 2023, belongs to Sea Breeze Ventures Ltd, IMO company number 4132925, a Belize company. Playa de Anzoras (9176917, built 1999), Playa de Laga (9719800, built 2014), and Playa de Laida (9719812, built 2015) belong to Beach Fishing Ltd, IMO company number 5786289, a Seychelles company.

Both of those companies give the same registered address. Sea Breeze Ventures Ltd, of Belize, is registered at "C/O: Pesquera Vasco-Montanesa SA (PEVASA) Poligono Landabaso 48730, Bermeo (Bizkaia), Spain." Beach Fishing Ltd, of the Seychelles, is registered at the same words. One industrial estate outside Bermeo, three companies, two of them incorporated on the other side of the world and both giving the third one's office as their address.

One detail in that address is wrong, and it matters less than it looks. Bermeo's post code is 48370, and the Pevasa-side records give 48730. Two digits transposed, which we read as a typing slip rather than a signal, and Albacora's record for the same estate gives 48370 correctly. The consequence is worth a line: match these companies on the address string and the Pevasa side does not join up with the rest of the estate. Match them on the company number and it does not matter how the post code was typed.

Last issue we described IMO 9109263 as owned by Bao Power Shipping Co Ltd of the Marshall Islands, registered care of a ship management firm in Weihai, Shandong, and called it a flag of convenience company whose address is care of a Chinese manager. This is the same instrument, built by a European company for a European fleet. Anyone who read that item as a fact about China read it wrong, and this is the correction.

The difference runs the other way from what you might expect. Sea Breeze and Beach Fishing name Pevasa in their own registered addresses, so the chain is legible to anyone who looks the hulls up, and neither carries a single group beneficial owner record. The "c/o" line is doing voluntarily what the empty field does not, and the parent goes further: Pevasa's own record carries five group beneficial owners. So the group behind the Spanish company is on the register, and the group behind its two offshore vehicles is not. Nothing here suggests wrongdoing by any of them, and Seychelles and Belize registration on European-owned tuna seiners working the Indian Ocean is long standing and lawful. What it means is narrower: when a newspaper writes "Pevasa's five vessels", the sale is legally a transfer touching Spain, Belize, and the Seychelles, and no one register shows you all three.

The four vessels Pevasa had already sold on the way down show where a distressed fleet actually goes. Faro de Vigo gives their new names and we looked all four up. Playa de Bakio is IMO 9010345, built 1991: it became VASCO in October 2024, left Spain's flag for the Republic of Korea the same month, and belongs to Dongwon Industries Co Ltd of Seoul, IMO company 0200203. Playa de Aritzatxu is IMO 9228162, built 2002: it became BETI AURRERA in January 2025 and belongs to Albacora SA, IMO company 0785671, at Polígono Landabaso, Bermeo. That is the same Albacora that bid for Playa de Ris this month, and the same industrial estate. Playa de Noja is IMO 8806955, built 1989, and has been three ships by name: Felipe Ruano from 1989, Playa De Noja from 2012, BEATRIZ CRISTINA from June 2025, when it took the United States flag under Beatriz Fishing Co LLC of Medley, Florida, IMO company 0253862.

The fourth does not fit. The macicero Zillarri is IMO 9095266, built 2007, 278 GT, and the identity register still gives its name as ZILLARRI, effective July 2016, with no name Al Malah recorded at all. Our own records give it the earlier name Zala and no Al Malah either. Its registered owner since June 2017 is Sea Breeze Ventures Ltd, the same Belize company that owns Playa de Azkorri, and its flag, since September 2025, is recorded as Unknown. We are not saying the newspaper is wrong; a vessel is commonly renamed before the register catches up, and that is this newsletter's whole subject. What we can say is that as at 7 August 2026 neither register we hold corroborates the name, and that a hull whose flag reads Unknown is one nobody is currently answerable for.

So a Bermeo fleet has dispersed. Between October 2024 and June 2025 the owners of three of those hulls came to be recorded in Seoul, in Bermeo, and in Florida. Zillarri sits outside that window on both counts: it has been held by a Belize company since 2017, well before the distress sales, and its flag went to Unknown in September 2025. We are deliberately not putting a number on the jurisdictions, because owner and flag do not move together here and counting them one way gives a different answer from the other. Not one of those moves is irregular and each was reported somewhere. No single record shows you all of them.

Our own records are no cleaner. As at 7 August 2026 we still link Vasco, Beti Aurrera, and Beatriz Cristina to Pevasa as owner. We file IMO 9228162 under three names and one of them, Playa de Bakio, belongs to a different hull entirely; the identity register settles that in a line, because Playa de Bakio is 9010345 and Playa de Aritzatxu is 9228162 and they were never the same ship. And we hold Pevasa under twenty separate entity records and Atunsa under thirty four, spellings running from a bare acronym to a version with the company's own name misspelt, which cannot be added together because two records may claim one hull. Three company numbers, 0388938, 4132925, and 5786289, settle in one step what fifty four separate records cannot.

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Ghana suspended four trawlers and named none of them

Two trawl companies, two post office boxes in the same fishing harbour. One records sixteen beneficial owners. The other records none.

Ghana has now spent five years under a European Union yellow card for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Four industrial trawlers currently have their licences suspended for one year, and none of the four has been named publicly.

The detail comes from a press conference in Accra on the first half of 2026, reported by Doanh nghiệp và Hội nhập (6 August 2026), a Vietnamese trade title covering Ghana as a warning to its own fleet, which is under a yellow card of its own. Fisheries Minister Emelia Arthur said prosecutions and penalties had been stepped up, and acknowledged that out of court settlements are blunting the deterrent. More than USD 400 million of annual exports to the EU are at stake, and a red card would end them.

This is Ghana's second card. It was first yellow-carded in 2013 and cleared in 2015. The second card came on 2 June 2021, and at that point Ghana and Panama were the only two states to have received one twice (SeafoodSource, 3 June 2021). The Commission's stated concern was saiko, the illegal transfer of frozen bycatch from industrial trawlers to canoes at sea, and loopholes in the monitoring of Ghana-flagged vessels. Marine catch has fallen from around 420,000 tonnes in 1999 to roughly 202,000 in 2014, against domestic demand now above 1.2 million tonnes a year (Doanh nghiệp và Hội nhập).

Who owns Ghana's industrial trawl fleet is not an open question, and we are not going to treat it as one. It is the subject of two pieces of research Miren Gutierrez co-authored at ODI: Western Africa's missing fish, with Kevin Watkins and Ishbel Matheson (29 June 2016), and the distant water fleet report cited above. The Environmental Justice Foundation, which documented saiko, put it plainly in 2021: the lack of transparency "allows these operators to set up opaque corporate structures and work through Ghanaian 'front' companies to obtain licenses to fish", with China accounting for nearly 90 per cent of the vessels found at fault in Ghana's industrial trawl sector. EJF's recommendation was that Ghana publish its licence lists and its penalties "where the true 'beneficial' owners are clear in both cases".

Five years on, that field reads as follows for two of the largest trawl owners on Ghana's register.

Panofi Co Ltd, IMO company number 5048331, at PO Box 581, Fishing Harbour, Tema: seven ships owned, seven operated, seven managed, zero group beneficial owners.

Afko Fisheries Co Ltd, IMO company number 0569022, at PO Box 868, Fishing Harbour, Tema: sixteen ships owned, seven operated, seven managed, sixteen group beneficial owners.

Panofi's line is seven, seven, seven, and none, which is the same reading East Africa Fishery Co Ltd gives in the first item of this issue, on the other side of the continent. The two companies have nothing to do with each other. They have filled in the same form the same way.

To be plain about it, because the two halves of this item sit close together: neither Panofi nor Afko is known to be among the four suspended trawlers. Ghana has not published the four, we picked these two because they are among the largest trawl owners on the register, and nothing here connects either company to the suspensions.

What the two do show is that the field is a choice. Two Ghanaian trawl companies, two post office boxes in the same fishing harbour, and opposite answers to the same question. Nobody is obliged to fill it in, and one of them did.

The hulls carry a history their owners' records do not. Afko's IMO 9020807 was built in Japan in 1991 and flew the Japanese flag as Koyo Maru No. 15 for thirty four years; it came onto Ghana's register in May 2025 and was renamed AFKO 808 in the same month. We still hold it under its Japanese name. Panofi's IMO 9565352, 1,100 GT, has been Ghana-flagged since delivery in July 2009, where the identity register names it PANOFI DISCOVERER and we name it PANOFI FORERUNNER. One hull, two registers, two current names, and neither of them wrong on its own terms.

One caution on Panofi's seven, because it is not the only number we hold. Seven is the identity register's count of ships in service under that company number today. Our own records link between 21 and 28 Ghana-flagged hulls to Panofi, and the reason that is a range rather than a figure is that we hold the company under four separate renderings of its name: PANOFI, PANOFI CO LTD, PANOFI CO. LTD, and PANOFI COMPANY LIMITED. Each carries a slightly different set of hulls, and they cannot be added together because two renderings may claim the same vessel.

The two numbers are not in conflict. Seven counts vessels in service now; the twenties count every hull any fishery register has ever printed against that name, including ones long since sold or scrapped. Neither is a fleet count, and the only thing that resolves the four renderings into one company is the number, 5048331.

We hold 641 vessels under Ghana's flag as at 7 August 2026, and 310 companies linked to them, among them Mankoadze Fisheries (IMO company 0046800), State Fishing (0052061), Ocean Fisheries (0048664), and Kaleawo Enterprises (0045470). Treat both numbers as floors and not as a census: a hull is visible only where a register prints it, and a company only where a register prints its name. What the company numbers are good for is that each one can be run against the beneficial owner field, by anyone, including the four suspended trawlers whenever they are named.

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Also on the water

• Operation North Pacific Guard, led by Fisheries and Oceans Canada with the Canadian Coast Guard, the RCMP, the Fisheries Agency of Japan, the United States Coast Guard, and NOAA, put the CCGS SIR WILFRID LAURIER across 23,000 kilometres over two months. Thirty high seas inspections produced 52 potential violations of international fishing rules, and daily aerial patrols out of Hokkaido produced 344 further inspections and 21 more (SeafoodSource, 6 August 2026). CTV News headlines its account "Shark finning, dolphin harpooning reported after Canadian crackdown on high seas". Seventy three findings, and not one vessel named in either account.
• The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has unanimously affirmed the dismissal of a suit against Cooke Inc., Omega Protein, Ocean Harvesters, and Alpha VesselCo Holdings, which alleged that Cooke, a Canadian company, controlled a United States fishing fleet it is barred from owning under the American Fisheries Act of 1998 (SeafoodSource, 6 August 2026). The court held that wild fish in public waters are not government property, so the claim could not stand under the False Claims Act. The ownership question was never reached. It is worth an issue on its own, because as at 7 August 2026 Omega Protein appears in the records we hold under four different renderings of its name, only one of which carries a company number (IMO company 1930017).
• Indonesia's fisheries ministry says it apprehended 92 vessels for illegal fishing through early August (ANTARA News, 4 August 2026). Sri Lanka's navy arrested 36 people and confiscated 17 dinghies in operations between 16 and 31 July (Newswire.lk, 4 August 2026). Thanh Hoa province in Vietnam, which has 6,200 fishing vessels, reports that from January to the end of July its monitoring team flagged 107 vessels as possibly having lost their tracking signal and 13 as having crossed the permitted boundary at sea (Baothanhhoa.vn, 7 August 2026).
• The Philippine Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional the requirement that commercial fishing vessels be monitored and report their position around the clock (Supreme Court of the Philippines), and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources is filing a motion for reconsideration (Philippine News Agency, 3 August 2026). The regulation struck down is Fisheries Administrative Order 266, which required Philippine-flagged commercial vessels to fit vessel monitoring systems and submit electronic catch reports. We hav

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Corrections. We publish register findings, so we expect to be checked. If anything here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in the next issue and annotate the web version, naming what changed. Vessel operators and named companies get the same right of reply as anyone else. Write to [email protected].

On sources. Ship particulars are from the IMO ship identity register. Authorisation and licence records are from the published registers of the bodies named against them. Where a claim comes from a news outlet or an NGO, we say so and link it. Where two sources disagree, we print both.