"Pirate hunter'' Mr. Eric Ellen told an insurance conference last week that there were more than 100 incidents of piracy last year and more than $200 million worth of cargo was stolen.

But he also urged insurers to probe more deeply when claims for lost ships or cargo are reported. In many cases, the lost cargo was never on board and invoices and other legal documents are faked.

The decorated Londoner is the retired chief constable of the Port of London Police. He was awarded the Republic of China Police Medal 1st Class 1979 for his outstanding contribution to international policing and the Queen's Medal for distinguished police service 1980.

Months after his retirement that year, he was appointed first director of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), International Maritime Bureau. By 1985, he was also appointed first director of the ICC Counterfeiting Bureau, and in 1993 he was first director of ICC Commercial Crime Bureau.

He is now the executive director of ICC Commercial Crime Services, the umbrella organisation for the three bureaux.

Piracy, fraud and related matters continue to exist because of a lack of policing on the high seas, Mr. Ellen told the International Risk Management Group Conference at Marriott's Castle Harbour esort this week. And governments, wary of political implications, prohibit their vessels from interfering.

But it's not just piracy that concerns him. He gave the example of a Honduran-flagged ship, M.V. Erria Inge , owned by an Australian, and chartered to a company in Singapore. The Singaporean company simply treated the ship as their own and didn't pay anything to the owner, who was in search of his vessel for two years.

He eventually found the ship in Thailand, but because of corruption, the ship broke arrest and was lost in the South China Sea.

"About 18 months ago, a man rang me and said, Mr. Ellen, I've bought the Erria Inge and I'm going to sell it for scrap to China. But I looked over the vessel to take parts off which I wanted for myself.

"He said I'd gone to the refrigerator room and in there I found 10 dead bodies. What should I do with the 10 dead bodies?'' Mr. Ellen ascertained that the nearest port was Singapore and he directed the man to go to the authorities there to report his find. After a minor investigation, the Singaporean authorities there said that they had lost no-one from Singapore, the ship had been outside their jurisdiction and they couldn't help.

The ship was taken into China and the Chinese hosed down the refrigeration room, leaving instead of ten dead bodies, ten skeletons, which were placed into jars.

Interpol was asked to help with identification, but said they couldn't. Mr.

Ellen was called in and he hired a journalist/pathologist, who determined, to everyone's surprise, that the skeletons were of Caucasians.

Mr. Ellen said that after prostitution and medicine, piracy is the oldest profession in the world.

"Last week, a ship was in transit from Singapore to Vietnam. It was carrying a cargo of Brandy and cigarettes, valued at $1.7 million. It was in the Gulf of Thailand when it was approached by a Chinese vessel, which intercepted the ship on the high seas.

"You have to ask what the Chinese where doing in the Gulf of Thailand?'' The vessel was taken off its course to another port, the cargo was removed and sold.

In another case, after the pirates raided the ship' safe and were about to leave, when the captain started to run away along a deck. He and his chief officer were shot dead. The ship was then taken into an Indonesian port for a thorough investigation by the Indonesian Police. The ship owner was told that he could have his ship back for $250,000.

The crew were convinced to deny there was an incidence of piracy and to say that the whole affair was related to a mutiny at sea.

Mr. Ellen said that you can order a ship stolen by going to a certain hotel in Manila. "It will cost you US$350,000,'' he declared. And if you wanted no crew on board, the pirates, upon hijacking the ship on the high seas, simply throw the crew overboard.

One pirate named Captain Chanko made the mistake of stealing a tanker belonging to the Government of the Philippines. He was incarcerated and later found dead. His brother in a television interview last week claimed he was murdered.

Phantom ships are ships that are stolen and temporarily re-registered under a different name to a new owner in Far east cities like Hong Kong or Singapore.

This occurs about ten times a year and is a direct loss to insurers. People desperately trying to ship goods load their cargo on ships and see them depart port.

The cargo is then stolen by the people operating the ship, and the ship's name is changed. There are examples were a single ship has changed its name five or six times, leaving a trail of broken promises and stolen cargo in its wake.

Mr. Ellen said the problem never goes away until the insurers do something about it.

Back in 1979, an investigation uncovered the fact that out of 50 ships that had disappeared in the South China Seas in two years, 36 had disappeared under mysterious circumstances and they could prove scuttling, or deliberate sinking in some of them.

The ICC International Maritime Bureau has a regional piracy Centre (RPC) based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where they recorded 101 piracy incidents around the world, 76 in the Far East area.

Mr. Ellen said that while piracy has always been found in Asian waters, in other parts of the world, it is often cyclical. Last year, there were seven incidents in Brazil, three in Ecuador and one in the Caribbean. Within the Asian sub-total of 81 incidents, South Asia accounted for three (two in Bangladesh, one in Sri Lanka), while South East Asia accounted for 38 (including 26 in Indonesia and five in Malaysia.

This contrasts sharply with the situation only four years ago when the Indonesian waters of the Singapore Strait had over 80 attacks in one year.

In an area now known as the Hainan Triangle or HLH, an imaginary triangle with Hong Kong, the main Philippine island of Luzon and Hainan, a large Chinese island off the coast of Vietnam, there were 43 incidents last year.

The name was created for this area, because the South China Sea was too vague a geographical description and the attacks were especially peculiar. In the beginning, shots were fired and the ships were buzzed by small craft, as if the attackers were too incompetent to board. Since then, there have been many incidents where the vessels have been boarded and a lot of shots have been fired.

Some have suggested that recent attacks may be an extension of Chinese nationalism, with its root cause the existing sovereignty dispute over several islands in the area. Others say this is a maritime extension of differences between factions of Chinese organised crime, as to who has the right to smuggle what into where.