this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
42 points (97.7% liked)

UK Politics

4230 readers
182 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

MV True Confidence, owned Liberia, operated Greece, flagged Barbados, sailing China to Saudi Arabia then Jordan, personnel Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines, Nepal.

3 crew murdered.

[–] Are_Euclidding_Me@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

Hmm, the Wikipedia article about this ship is odd. Check out this paragraph: "The Houthis claimed that the vessel was American-owned, however a spokesman for the ship's owners rejected the claim, saying it had no relation with American entities.[6] The vessel's owners, the company True Confidence Shipping, is registered in Liberia, and she is operated by the Greece-based organization Third January Maritime. Both firms confirmed that they were unrelated to the United States. However, until 24 February 2024 the vessel was connected to the Los Angeles-based Oaktree Capital Management.[6][18]"

So, we have True Confidence Shipping being the owners of a single ship, the MV True Confidence. (I looked up True Confidence Shipping, they really do only own the one ship.) I don't know whether it's common in maritime shipping to have only one ship per shipping company, but it seems a little odd to me.

Furthermore, until February 24, 2024, the vessel had ties to an american firm, Oaktree Capital Management. I think this is true, as I've seen this claim in quite a few articles about the incident.

So let's think about the timing here: February 24, the ship changed ownership. 11 days later, on March 6, it was attacked by Ansar Allah, who claims they attacked it because it's an american ship. It seems to me we have two options: first, the ship really did change hands in those 11 days between February 24 and March 6, and Ansar Allah had outdated information, leading to a mistaken attack. This is possible. The second option is that the so-called ownership change was really just adding a shell company and Ansar Allah saw right through that and attacked anyway. Knowing what I know about capital and american firms, this option seems very plausible to me, but without a lot more time researching, and some real, actual knowledge about maritime shipping, I have no way of knowing.

So yeah, take your pick: Ansar Allah made an honest (and easy-to-make) mistake or they saw through an attempt to sneak an american vessel by them using a shell company. Or, I guess, you could choose to believe that it's neither of these options and Ansar Allah are just "Yemeni maniacs" trying to cause trouble because "they hate us for our freedom" or some such nonsense. You're welcome to believe that too.