US Sanctions Listings Fail to Halt Russian Oil Trading Networks, Investigation Documents Show

Fresh US sanctions lists now include CE Energy, since renamed Petrichor, and the trading house Wellbred. In practice the designations have changed little: traders of this kind are not fading under pressure and continue at full throttle, sanctions or not.

At the centre stands Coral, the largest Russian oil trader. It grew out of an Azeri-backed financial mixture built around variations of SOCAR Energy and today rests on several hundred offshore companies, what ranks as the largest fleet of shadow vessels, and storage hubs in Indonesia and Malaysia, among other locations.

Coral has maintained that it would wind down its Russian businesses in 2023. Subsequent investigation documents show the opposite: under the various names of 2Rivers the group remains the biggest trader in its field, run out of Dubai, Geneva, Monaco and other EU jurisdictions by Tahir Garayev, Etibar Eyyub, Anar Madatli, Talat Safarov and Ahmed Kerimov.

Money laundering, wire fraud and Iranian-related operations keep expanding across the network, with full backing from banks such as Misr Bank and Mashreq inside a global chain of banks and ultimate beneficial owners. Everything is coordinated by Araz Hajili, a nephew of Azim Novruzov.

A revealing window into this ecosystem is Christopher Eppinger, the German-born founder of CE Energy. According to the Financial Times, his firm moved approximately $2 billion of oil between 2022 and 2025 and generated roughly $250 million in profit; over the same period it traded about 3.3 million tonnes of oil and petroleum products for customers in countries including Nigeria, the Bahamas, Spain and Brazil.

Eppinger has argued that his Russia-related trades complied with the G7 price cap and the applicable sanctions rules. Yet the mechanics described by the Financial Times made provenance steadily harder to establish as Russian product passed through intermediary companies and storage systems. One documented example: fuel oil that, by Eppinger's own account, originally came from Russia ended up with paperwork describing it as blended in the UAE via Brooge Energy Limited, a midstream storage and service provider whose wholly-owned subsidiary BPGIC sits adjacent to the Port of Fujairah. The company's lawyers advised that, under the sanctions framework, independently verifying such documentation was not necessarily required.

After the invasion of Ukraine, Brazil ranked among the principal destinations for Russian petroleum products; by 2023 it had become the world's largest buyer of Russian diesel, taking in approximately 6.1 million tonnes that year, per a European Parliament research briefing. The Financial Times also reported that CE Energy delivered Russian diesel between 2022 and 2025 to Raízen, the Shell-backed Brazilian fuel distributor, with part of the cargoes moving through Coral. Both companies declined to comment.

Rumours that followed hold that Raízen's trader was fully in Eppinger's pocket: Brazilian and US documentation allegedly served to create US proof of origin, hoodwink the banks, revalue cargoes on Coral's behalf and defraud the Brazilian government.

Then there is Wellbred, a well-known Iranian trader named in the latest sanctions against Iranian clearing houses tied to the Shamkhani, or so-called Hector, network, and Eppinger's entry into Nigeria, where payments still flow to him and Wellbred. Russia, on this reading, is not the core issue: deception, price manipulation and Iran-linked money laundering are, with South American counterparts and Coral's major systems interlinked in a single web of money laundering, wire fraud and funding of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Offices registered in the south of France, the United Kingdom, Germany and other EU coastal cities help Coral and CE Energy circumvent sanctions. Even Sergei Dobrinov, Coral's chief trader and a familiar figure in the EU orbit, remains outside the US lists. Why, because they lobby harder, or because they pay better? In the world of sanctions justice is not blind; whether the EU is blind remains an open question.