FRENCH authorities have seized close to five tonnes of cocaine from a small boat and dumped the drugs at sea before allowing the crew and vessel to leave French Polynesia.

French authorities claimed the seizure took place in international waters, but local station Tahiti Nui Television quoted officials as saying the drugs were seized in French Polynesia’s maritime zone.

The cocaine was valued at around $USD150 million.

In a headline, the station noted: “4.87 tonnes of cocaine… but no legal action taken.”  

Lead prosecutor Solène Belaouar initially told TNTV that “Article 17 of the Vienna Convention stipulates that the navy can intercept a vessel on the high seas, after checking its flag state.”

Ten days after the first reports of the seizure, Belaouar was no longer talking about the ‘high seas,’ instead claiming the need for a new strategy to handle drug flows.

“The Pacific has become the superhighway for drugs”, Belaouar asserted, and that “70 per cent of cocaine trafficking passes through this route.”

At the same time as those contradictory statements were raising questions in Tahiti, questions were also being asked 1100 kms to the southwest, when the briefly seized vessel, the MV Raider, turned up in the Cook Islands broadcasting a distress signal.

Customs officials in Rarotonga told the daily Cook Islands News the vessel was reporting engine trouble and was taking shelter from bad weather.

They confirmed MV Raider was the same vessel that had been intercepted by French naval forces with the drugs on board.

Online records indicate that the ship was built in 1991 in the United States, with a “Provisional Certificate of Registry” from the Togo Maritime Authority dated only two months ago, on November 19, 2025.

According to maritime experts, provisional certification is a red flag that allows what industry sources term the “dark fleet” to exploit open registries.

This “allows entry on a temporary basis (typically three to six months) with minimal due diligence pending submission of all documentation,” according to a 2025 review from Windward, a marine risk consultancy. “Vessels then ‘hop’ to another flag before the provisional period expires.”

Windward listed Togo as being among ship registries that flagged ships with little to no oversight, along with Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Barbados, Belize, Cameroon, Comoros, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Hong Kong, Liberia, Mongolia, Oman, Panama, San Marino, São Tomé and Príncipe, St. Kitts and Nevis, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Vietnam.

In the Pacific, other registries noted by Windward include the Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Palau, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

The crew onboard the Raider at the time of the drug seizure is 10 Honduran citizens and one from Ecuador.

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