In late March 2024, Mardi, an oil products tanker sailing under a Cameroon flag, completely disappeared from vessel tracking databases after spending a couple of days circling in the Mediterranean east of Malta. It reappeared a month later north of Libya.

The Mardi is one of 48 vessels identified by a panel of UN experts monitoring Libya. They said in their latest report in December that it made 14 visits to Benghazi’s old harbour and smuggled out over 13,000 tonnes of diesel between March 2022 and October 2024, in breach of UN sanctions on Libya. The International Maritime Organization holds no information on the owner of the Mardi.

According to the UN experts, the smuggling is enabled by a controversial barter scheme under which Libya — which lacks the capacity to refine fuels at scale — swaps its own crude output for refined fuels, rather than paying for them with cash. The fuel is sold domestically at heavily subsidised prices.