Most ships avoid filing routes as Iran charges tolls in Hormuz despite sanctions

Eighty-nine ships sailed dark. Between August 1 and August 19, 112 crude, LNG and LPG carriers crossed the Strait of Hormuz, and most of them refused to file a route at all. Twenty-one openly took the Iranian coastal lane. Two bothered with the American-backed Omani one. Al Jazeera reported the counts on August 20, citing Kpler data.

Washington insists its Navy controls the water; Tehran says nothing passes without its blessing. The market answered neither of them: it simply stopped admitting which corridor it sails through. The world's most powerful navy now patrols a strait its users will not own up to using, and that silence cannot hold out the year.

The contradiction has a name and a ledger. Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the PGSA, now sits on the US Treasury blacklist, sanctioned since May for doing what its function implies: charging ships to pass, as AGBI reported on July 27.

Before the sanctions landed, vessels had reportedly paid as much as two million dollars for transit approval, settled not in dollars but in Chinese yuan, with no published tariff at all — Lloyd's List carried those details, cited by AGBI the same day. Iran officially does not operate this booth. Its billboards in the Tehran metro brag it could earn one hundred billion dollars a year from the waterway (Euronews, May 18).

The insurers move first

Then the insurers moved. On July 23 the Lloyd's Market Association published a model clause letting hull insurers cancel cover entirely if a shipowner pays anything, financial or otherwise, to secure passage through Iranian waters — no reimbursement of the fee, and discharge from all obligations on the vessel, per the association's update cited by AGBI on July 27. Pay the toll and your ship becomes uninsurable. Sail uninsured through a mined, missile-swept strait and no bank will finance the cargo.

The trigger was the death of a chief engineer aboard the Liberia-flagged bulker MINOAN DIGNITY, hit by an unknown projectile outbound through the southern corridor overnight August 17–18. Lloyd's List Intelligence set out those facts on August 19; UANI flagged the same events that day, along with the expiry on August 17 of the sixty-day window under the June 17 memorandum between Washington and Tehran, which closed without agreement and brought back the American blockade. The pressure is older. Since the war began in late February, every transit has required a private calculation about which authority's rules a captain can afford to obey.

Iran needs revenue and recognition — a strait it commands is leverage when its own oil exports are drying up and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is promising the toughest sanctions in history, as gCaptain carried Reuters' report on August 21. Washington wants passage declared open without committing the hulls to guarantee it. The Gulf exporters want barrels moving; Saudi Aramco resumed loading inside the strait between August 12 and 16, sending three Sinokor very large crude carriers out of Juaymah and Ras Tanura with two million barrels each — Reuters had that on August 18. And the shipowners want to keep their insurance.

The ones who defied Tehran are earning fortunes for the risk. Middle East Gulf-to-China supertanker earnings hit five hundred ten thousand dollars a day this week, the highest since June, with one Sinokor vessel booked for a thirty-one million dollar voyage — figures Bloomberg put out on August 18, cited by OilPrice and by Middle East Eye the next day. The same outlet noted on August 19 that the Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF, a fund tracking freight futures, is up roughly 2,200 percent this year.

Every week the toll booth stays ambiguous profits someone other than the crew. ADNOC says fifteen of its vessels have been attacked since the war began, killing one sailor and wounding twenty, according to a statement cited by Al Jazeera on August 20.

Cheaper than the fight

Denmark collected the Sound Dues from every ship passing into the Baltic for more than four centuries, from 1429 until 1857. Kings hated paying, merchants grumbled, but the toll held because Denmark controlled both shores and nobody wanted a war over a fee. Iran holds only one shore of Hormuz, which is exactly half of what the Danish model requires — yet the dark transits suggest many owners behave as if the fee were cheaper than the fight.

The counter-example cuts the other way. In 1956 Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and the users organized a military response within months; when Britain and France failed, the canal kept flowing anyway under international tolerance rather than tribute. Suez had a functioning international regime willing to operate around the seizure. Hormuz has no such regime today — the UN convention is unenforced, the American corridor is nearly empty on paper, and no institution speaks for the shippers who keep passing through.

Two fleets

Owners are splitting into two fleets. Insured ships that never touch the northern route, and dark ships — over sixty percent of all traffic in the first nineteen days of August, per the Kpler data Al Jazeera reported on August 20 — that run without transponders and, effectively, without full cover.

The cost lands on Asian refiners paying record freight and on European motorists, as Gulf refinery damage pushes diesel margins to record highs, AGBI reported on August 21.

And the yuan settlement builds a parallel payments rail that survives any future ceasefire, because a working financial channel is not dismantled just because the shooting stops.

Transit counts staying low while dark passages climb would confirm the picture. Preliminary figures Lloyd's List Intelligence published on August 19 showed seventy-three transits in the week to August 16, down from ninety-one the week before, alongside more owners publicly adopting the Lloyd's clause. A single well-publicized seizure of a toll-paying vessel would break it, or an insurer actually refusing a claim under the new wording, which would force owners to choose openly between Tehran's permit and London's policy. The moment that choice is forced, the ambiguity dies.

The people absorbing this are the twenty-plus crews sailing dark past minefields so their owners can decide later whose rules they broke.

Iran keeps a toll booth it denies operating, America runs a corridor owners refuse to admit using, and the true border checkpoint of the Persian Gulf now sits in a Lloyd's underwriting room — the fee schedule was written there before anyone in uniform agreed to it.