Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sweden has sharply criticized China for not letting the Nordic country’s chief investigator board a Chinese ship suspected of cutting two cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Yi Peng 3 left its berth in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday and appears to be headed to Egypt after Chinese investigators boarded the ship on Thursday.
According to the authorities in Stockholm, the Chinese team allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark on board as observers, but did not allow Swedish prosecutor Henrik Söderman access.
“This is something the government inherently takes seriously. “It is remarkable that the ship is leaving without the prosecutor being given the opportunity to inspect the ship and question the crew as part of a Swedish criminal investigation,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in a statement to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government had put pressure on the Chinese authorities that the bulk carrier be allowed to sail from international waters into Swedish territory to allow a full investigation into the separation of the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German data cables last month.
People familiar with the investigation said the ship’s boarding on Thursday showed there was little doubt it was involved in the incident.
Yi Peng 3 is owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company that owns only one other ship and is based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A Ningbo Yipeng representative told the FT in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation” but did not answer further questions.
There is disagreement among the countries about the reasons for cutting the cables. Some people familiar with the investigation said they believed it was poor seamanship that may have caused the Yi Peng 3’s anchor to drag on the seabed in the East Sea.
However, other governments have said privately that they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid money to the ship’s crew.
The cutting of the two cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
The New new polar bearA Chinese container ship damaged a gas pipeline in October 2023 by dragging its anchor a significant distance across the bottom of the Baltic Sea during a storm. Officials responded slowly to this incident and allowed the ship to leave the region without stopping, something they were keen to prevent in the case of the Yi Peng 3.
Nordic and Baltic officials are skeptical about the possibility that the same thing could happen twice in quick succession. “The Chinese must be really terrible captains if this sort of thing continues to happen innocently,” a Baltic minister said.
