Delivering Cash to Pirates as Difficult as Negotiating Ransom

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 20, 2008 — -- Negotiating with pirates is such a cutthroat business that shipowners have to make sure they don't get robbed a second time while delivering the ransom.

Firms that have negotiated the return of their ships and crews from Somali pirates have discovered that one pirate may grab another pirate's ransom, leaving the captured ship still in hostile hands and an angry pirate still demanding his booty.

A kidnap-for-ransom consultant, known as a K&R specialist, is likely telling that now to the Saudi firm that wants to recover its supertanker the Sirius Star, loaded with $100 million worth of crude oil.

"There are around 12,000 pirates in the water now and all of them know that a ransom has been asked for," said Capt. Thomas Brown, manager director of Seacurus, a British insurance brokerage company that who offers a piracy specific insurance policy.

The Agence France-Presse reported today that pirates had made their first demand for the return of the tanker: $25 million. Vela International, the tanker's owners, has made no public comment on whether negotiations are under way.

Brown said that ransoming a vessel is such a cutthroat business that shippers now must not only insure their ships and their cargo, but their ransoms as well.

Negotiating with Somali pirates has become a booming and very expensive business as they have turned the busy shipping lanes of the Somali coast into a shooting gallery for passing tankers, trawlers and container ships.

After a ransom fee has been settled on, which is usually between $1 million and $2 million, there is the difficult business of delivering the cash into a country that is carved up by vicious turf wars among feuding warlords.

Most ransom drops are made in the same seas where the ship was taken, at agreed-upon coordinates, said Jack Cloonan, an ABC News consultant and a former FBI agent who runs Clayton Consultants, a K&R consulting firm that negotiates kidnap-for-ransom cases globally.

An obvious drawback to paying a ransom in waterways infested with pirates is being robbed of the ransom before it can be delivered.

Consequently, a new industry has sprung up in the neighboring country of Kenya where tugboat captains in the coastal city of Mombasa offer to make the drop for a fee. Cloonan says that as hijackings have increased and ransom payments have grown more extravagant, so have the delivery fees.