Government explores new strategy to seize tanker off Texas coast

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has asked a US judge for permission to change its legal arguments in a bid to seize $100 million in Kurdish crude waiting in a tanker off Texas since late July, 2014.

Stymied by the judge’s ruling last month that he does not have jurisdiction under admiralty law, Iraq has come back with claims under maritime and Texas statutes.

US District Judge Gray Miller in Houston threw out an arrest warrant that gave federal agents authority to take the 1million barrels cargo and store it, at Iraq’s expense, if the tanker entered US waters. Miller said he had no authority to intervene in a foreign ownership dispute under US laws governing property stolen on the high seas. Iraq cited those laws as the basis to recover crude exported from wells in the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan without permission.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has now revised its complaint, citing different statutes to obtain a new arrest warrant aimed at preventing the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, from selling the cargo in the US. Iraq now cites the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and state law governing stolen property.

The proposed amended complaint names Kurdistan, which the US does not recognize as a sovereign nation, and the unknown “John Doe Buyer” believed to have purchased the cargo after it left Turkey in June.

The United Kalavryta had been circling within a 350-yard radius of a spot 60 miles southeast of Galveston from July 26 through September 1, when a vessel tracking service lost its signal.