After being among the top five shipping flags for five years in a row, Sweden has slipped down to 11th place on the Paris MOU white list. It has now been overtaken by countries such as Italy, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. This is the second year in a row that Sweden is not among the ten highest flags; last year it was number twelve. The ranking is based on a rather blunt method in which the number of port state controls in the Paris MOU region (European coastal states and Canada) are put in relation to the number of ships detained. Isolated cases can make big differences to the statistics. For example, two out of a total of 316 inspected ships flying the Swedish flag were detained in the last two years, resulting in 11th place. France, which tops the white list, had 258 inspections and no ships detained. Yet the rankings do say something important about ships under different flags. At the bottom of the black list are flag states such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Comoros, Togo and Tanzania, among which almost one third of all inspections led to detentions. The grey list contains an intermediate category with flags that have a significant number of ships detained, such as India, Lebanon, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. The most common reasons for a ship being detained are shortcomings in the ISM Code (1128), errors in sea charts (347) and errors in nautical publications (276). Technical problems can also lead to detentions, such as inadequate fire doors (230), unclean engine rooms (126) and problems with propulsion (126).