A leak of 10,000 hacked emails reveals more details about how the Iranian regime continues to evade Western oil sanctions, according to a new report from Reuters.
The Prana hacker network first released the emails from the Sahara Thunder oil tanker shipping company in February. Sahara Thunder is an Iran-based front company for the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, which the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in April.
The emails include both forged and real bills of lading, GPS updates and crew task sheets ordering ships to have their names changed in an effort to disguise the origins of Iranian crude.
The leak opens a window into Iran’s more than $50 billion annual petroleum exports, most of which end up in China.
One example of the lengths to which Iran goes to evade sanctions involves the oil tanker Remy, a Panama-flagged ship that was bound for Malaysia in February 2023 with documents indicating that it had received its 1 million barrel cargo of oil from Basra in southern Iraq. In fact, under the name “Deep Ocean,” it had taken on its cargo from Iran in a ship-to-ship transfer in the Persian Gulf.
The Remy then sailed east to the Strait of Malacca and in March transferred its million barrels of oil to two ships, one of which “spoofed” its location to pretend that it was at anchor 155 miles west of where the transfer was actually taking place. The two ships then unloaded at Lanqiao Port in Shandong, China.
The Sahara Thunder smuggling operations during the 2022-24 period covered by the emails involved 34 ships, including the Remy. Those ships are owned or operated by some 92 separate companies.
The Remy is just one piece of Iran’s “ghost fleet” of tankers that the Islamic Republic uses to illicitly move oil around the world.
United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit that advocates tougher U.S. measures against the Islamic Republic, maintains a database of more than 470 such vessels.
Some but not all of those ships and their owners have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.
Of the 34 ships tied to Sahara Thunder, 21 are under U.S. sanctions. The Remy, now operating as the Wilma II, is not one of them.