Financial Times has reported that a network of 48 companies helped disguise the origin of Russian crude linked to Rosneft, with trade flows that customs records suggest exceeded $90bn.
The newspaper said the arrangement relied on short-lived corporate vehicles, generic cargo descriptions and a shared digital back office that connected the firms despite their outward separation.
The investigation traced the network through a technical overlap: dozens of company web domains and email systems were tied to the same private mail server. FT said public domain-registration data pointed to hundreds of related domains using a single host, indicating common administration across the purportedly independent traders and shippers.
According to FT, the structure was operating before Washington imposed sanctions on Rosneft in October 2025. The paper reported that, as of late 2024, the network was handling a dominant share of Rosneft’s seaborne exports, suggesting the mechanism was embedded in the company’s trading routes before the US measures took effect.
US sanctions announced on 22 October 2025 designated Rosneft and Lukoil under Executive Order 14024, alongside a list of subsidiaries, with the Treasury Department stating the action was aimed at entities operating in Russia’s energy sector. The move widened the compliance and enforcement risks for counterparties, shipping providers and insurers dealing with Russian crude and products.
FT described the network as a churn of entities created to buy and resell crude in a way that complicated tracing. Companies typically operated for months and then ceased activity or were replaced by new names, according to the report. The objective, FT wrote, was to slow identification by regulators and make it harder to build sanctions cases against specific counterparties.
The reported trading pattern involved one set of firms purchasing crude linked to Rosneft, while other firms arranged onward sales and logistics to end markets including China and India. In some cases, the supply chain included intermediaries based in the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates, which has become a major hub for commodity trading and shipping services.
A further technique highlighted by FT was relabelling. Instead of specifying a recognisable Russian grade, cargoes could be described under broad terms such as an “export blend”, which reduces the usefulness of paperwork for identifying origin and makes screening more dependent on shipping, financial and corporate data.
Individuals linked to trading and shipping groups that have handled Russian oil have already been targeted by European measures. In a Council implementing regulation published in December 2025, the EU listed Azerbaijani national Etibar Eyyub, stating that he “founded and runs a network of companies including Coral Energy (later 2Rivers Group)” and that this network enabled shipments and exports of Russian oil, “notably” from Rosneft, by concealing the oil’s true origin. The EU text also referenced the use of vessels associated with Russia’s so-called shadow fleet.
Risk in European Waters: The Shadow Fleet, Sanctions Evasion and Safety Gaps
FT reported that EU officials said the newly identified corporate roster could inform further designations. The implication is that enforcement may increasingly focus on the service architecture around Russian exports: traders, shipmanagers, charterers, shell owners and back-office providers, rather than only on producers or headline shipping operators.
The report lands as European governments continue to manage exposure to Rosneft-linked assets and supply chains. On the same day as the FT investigation, Reuters reported that the European Commission cleared a structure allowing Berlin to keep long-term control over Rosneft’s German assets under trusteeship, following arrangements first imposed in 2022. The Reuters report also noted the interaction between these holdings and US sanctions, including exemptions tied to refinery operations.
Separately, Reuters reported that the US Treasury extended a waiver for Serbia’s Russian-owned NIS oil firm until March 2026, underlining how sanctions policy can include time-limited carve-outs to avoid abrupt supply disruptions while negotiations over ownership and compliance continue.
Serbia Faces Energy Crisis as U.S. Sanctions Target Russian Oil Interests
For regulators, FT’s core finding is that relatively mundane digital infrastructure can expose networks designed to look fragmented. For market participants, it underlines that sanctions screening is no longer confined to company names on lists, but increasingly depends on mapping operational links across domains, email systems, management services and shipping chains, especially where oil cargo documentation offers limited clarity on provenance.
