Dominguez secures Council backing for second term as IMO head until 2031

The IMO Council has endorsed Arsenio Dominguez for a second four-year term as secretary-general, keeping the Panamanian at the helm of the world's maritime regulator until December 31, 2031.

The 40-member Council backed the extension during its 138th session in London. The decision still needs formal approval from the IMO Assembly, which meets in late 2027. If confirmed, Dominguez's second term runs from January 1, 2028, through the end of 2031.

The timing matters. Dominguez would lead the agency through the most consequential regulatory rewrite in a generation — the Net-Zero Framework — while commercial shipping faces live security threats in three chokepoints at once.

What does the reappointment change for carriers and shippers?

Mostly continuity, and that's the point. Dominguez took office in January 2024 and has spent his first term managing deepening divisions among member states over the framework's two central mechanisms: a global marine fuel standard and an emissions pricing scheme.

Governments agreed the framework in principle in April 2025. Then came the setback. Last October, states voted to delay adoption by a full year after strong opposition led by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

For shipowners, that delay froze investment decisions on dual-fuel newbuildings and retrofit programmes, because the economics of methanol, ammonia and LNG propulsion hinge on what the fuel standard and pricing lever actually require. For shippers and forwarders, it left open how much of compliance cost will land on freight rates, and through which mechanism — a levy, a fuel standard, or both.

Revival efforts have continued throughout 2026, and the calendar is tight. Negotiations culminate later this month:

• The Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) meets from November 30 to December 3.
• An extraordinary session follows on December 4, specifically to revisit adoption of the framework.

That sequence gives Dominguez, if the December round lands, a ratified rulebook early in a term that would otherwise be consumed by the same fight.

Security files stack up alongside decarbonisation

The Council session this week also carries a heavy security agenda. Commercial shipping safety is under mounting pressure from continuing attacks and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Black Sea.

Three theatres, one regulator. Each disruption reroutes tonnage, stretches transit times and inflates war-risk premiums — costs that carriers recover through surcharges and capacity reallocation, and that shippers absorb in delivered prices. The Council agenda signals these files will stay at the top of the IMO's docket through Dominguez's next term, not fade after individual incidents quiet down.

Who is Dominguez?

He is the IMO's tenth secretary-general. Before taking the top job, he ran the organisation's Marine Environment Division, served as administrative director and chief of staff, represented Panama at the IMO, and chaired the Marine Environment Protection Committee — the very committee now handling the Net-Zero Framework's final rounds.

That CV cuts both ways. He knows the environmental file better than almost anyone in the building. He also inherits the political wreckage of it: US-Saudi opposition was strong enough to force the October delay, and bridging that gap is now his defining task.

He succeeded South Korea's Kitack Lim in January 2024, having secured the Council's backing in July 2023 followed by Assembly approval — the same two-step process his own extension now repeats.

The next checkpoint is procedural but binding: the late-2027 Assembly vote. Before that, the December 4 extraordinary session will show whether the framework Dominguez would spend his second term implementing actually exists.