Flag Registry Strains the Cook Islands' Relations With New Zealand

Avatiu — The Russia-facing tanker Eagle S under detention after a suspicious subsea cable damage incident off Finland, 2024. The vessel was flagged in Cook Islands (Finnish Border Guard)

The government of New Zealand is displeased with a semi-independent territory, the Cook Islands, which has outsourced its maritime registry to a private firm and ruffled diplomatic feathers. Maritime Cook Islands, a for-profit flag based in Rarotonga, attracted attention for the shadow fleet tankers accumulating on its registry last year - and Auckland has yet to forgive it. Thanks to this dispute, plus the Cook Islands' increasingly close relationship with China, New Zealand has paused foreign aid and de facto suspended high-level diplomatic contacts with its government, the New Zealand Herald reports.

The concerns began after a spurt of explosive growth at the registry. In the first half of 2024, Maritime Cook Islands (MCI) expanded its fleet by 140 percent, putting it in the top thirty flag registries by tonnage worldwide - largely by adding older tankers, allegedly including some in the shadow fleet. As early as November 2024, New Zealand's diplomats raised "deep concerns" about an apparent pattern of sanctions evasion among certain Cook Islands-flagged tankers.

In or around May 2025, MCI was removed from the Registry Information Sharing Compact (RISC), an international database designed to help registry administrators identify sanctions-busting ships and shipowners. RISC's managers alleged that MCI had violated certain terms of service - much to MCI's dismay. The registry has vigorously denied any wrongdoing.

As of October 2025, the Cook Islands-flagged fleet no longer includes tankers that call at Russian ports, and its flagged tanker fleet is a third of its peak size in 2024, maritime intelligence firm Starboard told the Herald.

But for the government of New Zealand, MCI's past services for Russia-serving shipowners remain a cause for concern.

"It was both alarming and infuriating to discover that the Cook Islands’ shipping registry was effectively undermining international efforts to cut off funding to Russia’s war machine by providing the Cook Islands flag to vessels that form part of Russia’s shadow fleet," Foreign Minister Winston Peters told the New Zealand Herald last week. "This is a completely unacceptable and untenable foreign policy divergence."

IMO has also shown a certain level of interest in the Cook Islands registry, though it has not expressed any form of criticism. Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez flew to the island nation in August to discuss topics of mutual interest with MCI and with Cook Islands' prime minister, the first time that any IMO secretary-general had visited the Cook Islands. Dominguez has prioritized the implementation of IMO conventions for his first term, and he was in the region to mark the opening of a regional presence office in Fiji. The office provides Pacific Island member states with capacity-building support and compliance auditing - a boost for a region with several growing registries.