CMA CGM Kribi

CMA CGM Kribi is a container vessel operated by the French shipping group CMA CGM, one of the world's three largest container carriers. The ship paid Iran's newly imposed Hormuz transit toll and in doing so became one of several allied-flag vessels cited in Trump's 13 April 2026 order directing the US Navy to interdict any ship in international waters that had paid the toll, a provision distinct from CENTCOM's narrower blockade of Iranian port traffic.

The interdiction order targeting CMA CGM Kribi and similar vessels put the US on a potential collision course with France, a NATO ally and permanent UN Security Council member. CMA CGM is majority-owned by the Merlin family and headquartered in Marseille; its vessels operate under multiple national flags and regularly transit the Persian Gulf serving Asian manufacturing hubs. The company had no mechanism to retroactively "unpay" the toll, putting its fleet in legal limbo between Iranian demands and US Navy interception authority.

The episode illustrated the second-order consequences of the Hormuz toll system: by paying the toll to continue trading, carriers from treaty-Allied Nations became compliance targets in the US enforcement regime. Paris lodged a formal diplomatic protest. The Kribi's situation became a live test case for whether the US would actually intercept allied commercial shipping, a step that would represent an unprecedented breach in NATO commercial relations.