Data is essential for availing the advantage of possibilities, but assessing that data demands trust in one’s facts and encounters. The United States government is presently investigating this case. 'It's a surprise and it's very significant.Since JP Morgan is only the owner, we should investigate whether the Mediterranean Shipping Company is blamed. 'There were doubts whether West Africa was still being used as a major transit route, but these seizures seem to suggest that there is a return,' Shaw said in an interview with Bloomberg in March. A month later, authorities in Guinea-Bissau notched their biggest-ever cocaine bust - and the country's first in a decade - when they discovered more than 1,700 pounds of the drug hidden in a false bottom of a truck loaded with fish. In February of this year, Cape Verde officials found 21,000 pounds of cocaine, with a street value north of $700 million, on a Panamanian-flagged vessel. In May 2018, Algerian officials seized more than 1,500 pounds of cocaine on a Liberian-registered container ship that was transporting frozen meat from Brazil, according to the BBC. The drug bust on a Liberian-flagged vessel is the latest in a string of major seizures linked to West African countries this year. 'Liberia serves as a flag state for much shipping.'Ī fraction of the cocaine seized from the MSC Gayane. 'A Liberian registered ship is not in itself a link with the West Africa drug economy,' Mark Shaw, the director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, said in an interview with Markets Insider. While notable, the ship's flag doesn't necessarily implicate Liberia. Higher street prices and a lower risk of getting caught make Europe a more lucrative and attractive market than the US, the Nigerian drug smuggler Chigbo Umeh told The Guardian in 2015. The proportion of cocaine seizures in Africa accounted for by West Africa rose to 78% in 2016, 'reflecting the rapidly growing importance of West Africa as a transit area,' the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said.īut there appears to be little drug smuggling between West Africa and the US, making the MSC Gayane drug bust highly unusual. West Africa is a popular transit route for smugglers between South America and Europe because of its porous borders, weak rule of law, largely unmonitored coastline, and limited infrastructure and resources.

The MSC Gayane sailed under the flag of Liberia, a West African country.

Chase bank boat drug bust