The second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway".

If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)

I feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.

Sanctioned by what international legal body?

> What is “fake insurance?”

Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?

You can literally press on it in the article and a definition pops up.

I didn’t see any article. I saw a propaganda piece.

Definitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.

How reliable is liability insurance for that sort of thing, generally speaking?

Quite. The real insurers are large, old, and have long made a name for themselves in this regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London

So existing legacy monopolies are real and all newcomers are fake. Got it.

Nah. The smaller new ones reinsure via folks like Lloyds. It’s quite complex.

The company in this article could have done that, but they forged documents to avoid it. They had no intention of covering accidents - it was just plain fake to get these ships into ports.

They were not truly insured.