21MAY

PGSA withholds its tariff four days on

3 min read

09:55UTC

The Persian Gulf Shipping Authority promised a formal fee schedule on 18 May and four days later has published nothing, blocking Lloyd's from underwriting Hormuz war-risk cover.

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Key takeaway

Tehran prefers case-by-case leverage to a published tariff Lloyd's could actually underwrite against.

Iran's PGSA (the Persian Gulf Shipping Authority, the IRGC-backed body administering Hormuz transit fees) launched its X account and vessel-submission portal on Monday 18 May, promising a formal fee schedule the same day . Four days on, the schedule has not appeared. Informal yuan and Bitcoin channels keep clearing transit payments in its absence .

The withholding preserves the case-by-case leverage Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Majlis national security committee, signalled on his personal X account on 16 May. A published tariff would lock Tehran into a price; an unpublished one lets PGSA price each vessel against its flag, its destination, and the sovereign behind it. Iraq pays in political engagement, Pakistan in bilateral arrangements for Qatari LNG, China through Beijing-channelled yuan wires. A formal schedule naming those prices openly would force every other counterparty to demand the same terms.

The leverage carries an underwriting cost. Lloyd's of London's Joint War Committee has held Hormuz war-risk cover suspended since 13 April, with hull rates currently at 110-125 per cent of vessel value in over-the-counter underwriting. The committee's published precondition for reopening is a written rulebook from one of the two governing authorities . Lloyd's cannot underwrite an authority that has not published its rules; P&I Club war-risk cover stays commercially unavailable for vessels outside Iran's bilateral arrangements.

The waterway runs on informal pricing nobody can insure. Iran preserves case-by-case discretion on every vessel that asks PGSA for permission; Western underwriters cannot price the resulting risk; the small handful of vessels that did transit on 20 May moved either on bilateral political engagement or by accepting hull-rate exposure. Either Tehran publishes a tariff and accepts the loss of leverage, or Lloyd's writes off the strait for the foreseeable future. PGSA's four-day silence between 18 and 22 May functions as Tehran's working answer.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran set up an official website for ships to apply for permission to use the Strait of Hormuz and pay the required fee. When the website launched on 18 May, Iran said the actual fee schedule how much each vessel would be charged would be published soon. Four days later, it still had not appeared. This matters because Lloyd's of London, the world's leading insurance market, will not reopen insurance cover for ships crossing the strait until it sees a published set of rules it can assess. Without insurance, shipping companies will not send vessels through the strait. A missing fee schedule keeps the insurance market closed and commercial transit frozen, even when diplomacy advances.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The PGSA's fee-schedule withholding reflects a specific institutional logic: the Majlis legislation explicitly designed the system around case-by-case discretion rather than published tariffs, because published tariffs would allow commercial operators to pre-calculate transit costs, enabling bulk compliance and removing the IRGC's transactional leverage over individual vessel operators.

A secondary structural cause is the Majlis-PGSA currency incompatibility: the rial-only bill passed committee on 20 May, while the operational PGSA portal uses yuan and Bitcoin. Publishing a fee schedule in either currency before the Majlis floor vote would lock the PGSA into a currency architecture that could be invalidated by legislation, creating an operational commitment Iran does not want to make until the legislative outcome is known.

What could happen next?

Consequence
The PGSA's deliberate fee-schedule withholding blocks Lloyd's JWC from evaluating war-risk cover, meaning commercial Hormuz transit cannot normalise even if a ceasefire is agreed, because insurance not just the military situation is the operational constraint.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
The Majlis rial-only bill (event index 2) and the PGSA's yuan/Bitcoin portal create a legal incompatibility that the fee schedule cannot resolve without either the Majlis bill being amended or the PGSA abandoning its yuan architecture. This internal contradiction may force a public governance crisis inside Iran's Hormuz management institutions.
Short term · Reported
Precedent
If the Yemen 2015-2020 arc repeats informal fees, delayed formalisation, no full published governance until international pressure under a later peace agreement Hormuz insurance normalisation could take years after any ceasefire announcement.
Long term · Reported

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from Iran and United States

Iran

United States

LeftRight

Primary parallel: The Yemen 2015 Houthi blockade of Hodeidah port, where passage was initially informal and fees charged case-by-case before a partial published schedule emerged under UN pressure in 2016, followed the same arc: informal leverage first, institutional framing second, never achieving full published governance. The Lloyd's market suspended Yemen war-risk cover in a similar manner; it was not restored until 2020 with the Stockholm Agreement's port access provisions.

Counter-parallel: The EU's 2014 establishment of SWIFT exclusion lists for Russian banks showed that the absence of published rules which entities were included and excluded was not always announced in advance creates operational paralysis in international financial markets even without a physical chokepoint. PGSA's unpublished fee schedule applies the same logic to maritime insurance: uncertainty itself is the barrier.

Consensus view: Chatham House's maritime governance researchers and the International Chamber of Shipping's secretariat both note that the PGSA's fee-schedule withholding is structurally equivalent to operating a toll system on the Suez Canal with unpublished tariffs: the absence of a published schedule is itself the enforcement mechanism, forcing each vessel into a bilateral negotiation that PGSA controls asymmetrically.

Counter-view: Iran's Strategic Council on Foreign Relations has publicly argued that the PGSA published its portal precisely to give commercial operators a known submission pathway, and that the fee schedule's delayed publication reflects the need for Iranian legal counsel to verify the document against the Majlis bill's rial-only provisions that the delay is bureaucratic, not strategic.

Key tension: Whether Lloyd's Joint War Committee's written-ROE condition can ever be met if the PGSA deliberately avoids publishing rules, because unpublished fees are by definition not the 'written rules of engagement' Lloyd's requires, making full Hormuz insurance normalisation dependent on a document Iran may never publish.

First Reported In

Update #104 · Three days to Hengli

Mehr News Agency· 21 May 2026

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