The registration is irrelevant; the actual owner and operator only matter.

The ship has as much to with Malta as .io domains with British Indian Overseas Territory.

Ah well, should’ve mentioned the owner and operator then to avoid laymen like me doing half baked googling!

Unfortunately and by industry standard, a ship's owner and operator are often obsfuscated under multiple layers.

It's about as easy to figure out who actually owns and is operating a ship as tracing an international bank account ~1980.

It'll be curious if one outcome of the Russian shadow fleets is a stronger worldwide push for verifiable true commercial maritime registration. Essentially: mandating transparency in shells and KYC reporting, in the same way post-9/11 financial reporting was implemented.

Improved transparency is already the direction of travel, but pushing back on that is part of "Project 2025" and Trump has signalled that's an important objective.

Flag of convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

Its a bit of a national meme that every ship that somehow gets into trouble is registered here