What a CIC actually costs: 30 detentions traced to one ballast water question

A Concentrated Inspection Campaign is easy to treat as paperwork until the results land. The Tokyo MoU has now published preliminary figures for the 2025 campaign on the Ballast Water Management Convention, and they show what a campaign quarter actually produces. According to the secretariat’s press release, the campaign ran from 1 September to 30 November 2025, jointly with the Paris MoU.

Across the period 9,244 inspections were carried out on all ship types. Of those, 6,930 — 74.96% — used the CIC questionnaire, with each ship subject to only one campaign inspection. In total 184 ships inspected under the campaign were detained, a 2.66% detention rate. Thirty of those detentions were a direct result of campaign-related deficiencies, which the secretariat records as a CIC-topic detention rate of 0.43%.

The concentration is the interesting part. According to the Tokyo MoU’s preliminary results, the most common deficiencies — including those that led to detention — sat under deficiency code 14811, the question asking whether the ballast water management system is operational. One question, asked consistently, accounted for the bulk of the campaign’s findings.

The distribution by ship type does not follow inspection volume. General cargo and multipurpose ships accounted for 43.33% of campaign-topic detentions (13), ahead of oil tankers (5), bulk carriers (4), gas carriers (3) and chemical tankers (3). Most detained ships were in the High Risk category — 26 of 30, or 86.6% — and most were aged between 19 and 24 years.

Flag figures deserve care. Ships flying the flags of Panama (1,983 inspections), Liberia (958) and the Marshall Islands (683) drew the highest absolute deficiency counts, but the secretariat notes this reflects inspection exposure. Normalised against inspections with a campaign questionnaire, the three ratios converge — 23.95%, 24.42% and 24.59% respectively. The secretariat also records that most flag States associated with campaign detentions appear on the Tokyo MoU High Performance List.

Further analysis goes to the Port State Control Committee meeting scheduled for September 2026. Trade advisories point to cargo securing as the 2026 campaign topic, running September to November; at the time of writing the questionnaire had not yet appeared on the Paris or Tokyo MoU websites.

Apeks view — The lesson of a campaign is not the topic, it is the method: one question asked of every ship for three months turns a scattered weakness into a measurable one. The deficiency codes that surfaced here are equipment-operation questions, not documentation questions. For technical managers, the practical read is that campaign readiness is demonstrated at the machine, not in the folder.