Ships Registration in Cyprus

Located on the crossroads of three continents, Cyprus has emerged into a growing maritime centre. The island’s geographical location recently combined with a number of financial incentives by carefully designed government planning have made the Cyprus flag widely attractive amongst the key players in the shipping industry.

The Cyprus Registry currently ranks tenth in the world accommodating a 20 million tonnage merchant fleet & third in the European Union. Ship-management companies operating in Cyprus manage one fifth of the global third party managed fleet. An effect of this has been that shipping industry now amounts to 7% of the country’s GDP.

Ship-owning companies and ship-management companies can benefit from a number of significant advantages by provisionally, permanently or parallel registering under the Cyprus flag.

Cyprus is a major international shipping centre. Ships and vessels of any type or size, except for those listed below, may be registered in the Register of Cyprus Ships or the Special Book of Parallel Registration, given that they satisfy age-related and type-related requirements.

Ships and vessels that are NOT qualified for registration:

  1. At the time of the application for their registration, are banned on port State control by a country member of any one of the Memoranda of Understanding on port State control, from entering the ports of the Countries party to that memorandum or that have been disqualified by a State from entering its ports;
  2. Have been detained on port State control grounds on more than three times within two years period before the submission of application for registration by States of the Paris or the Tokyo or the Mediterranean Memoranda of Understanding on port State control or by the US Coast Guard;
  3. Have been constructed exclusively for the use on inland navigation or that are to be utilized exclusively on inland navigation, i.e. internal waters, rivers, inland waterways, canals, natural or artificial lakes, water reservoir or dams.