Up close with the Indonesian pirates

In the work of investigating how much of the Indonesian pirate activities that went unreported, Risk Intelligences’ expert on Southeast Asia came in close touch with pirates in the Singapore Strait and the South China Sea. This relation presented the analyst with a firsthand view on how, and when, the pirates began to change their operational patterns - from having focused on hijacking smaller boats, they began to increasingly focus on palm oil and other petroleum products for resale. The resale of stolen petroleum products have since then become increasingly advanced and internationalized. The analyst came in contact with a pirate group that had hijacked a ship in the South China Sea, transferred its palm oil to a barge and sailed it to the Singapore Straits. Here, the load was transferred to a larger tanker bound for Europe, thus mixing it with legal palm oil. In this particular case, the stolen products were sold on the open market in Rotterdam as legal palm oil. Though this case represents the standard modus operandi, it was the first time that the analyst had seen it being associated with Europe. This is also the closest the pirates have come to the international shipping world just yet, as they previously have sought to stay below the radar of international attention.