In the spring of 2019, a polite middle-aged Iranian walked into a lawyer’s office in the Swiss town of Zug. Speaking with a subtle lisp, in excellent English, he introduced himself as Saeed Alikhani.
Alikhani told the lawyer he was an accountant working with a Panama-registered commodity broker, Ocean Glory Giant, that was seeking to establish offshore companies for an unusual trading arrangement.
The company wanted to set up naval mortgages — in this case a fixed charge secured on a ship, rather than a conventional loan to purchase one — against certain oil tankers to serve as guarantees for trades with Chinese buyers. If Ocean Glory did not receive payment for the oil it delivered, it could call in the mortgage and claim ownership of the vessel from the counterparty.
When asked about the origin of the oil, Alikhani produced two bills of lading, the lawyer recalls. One described a cargo of Malaysian crude and the other listed crude from Basra, in Iraq.
Over the next six months the lawyer agreed mortgages against at least nine oil tankers before passing on the work to two Swiss friends. They continued to arrange naval mortgages for Alikhani until at least 2023.
In total, the three Swiss signed mortgages against more than 30 tankers worth almost $1bn, according to documents lodged with the Panama Maritime Authority, where the vessels were registered at the time.
Zug, Switzerland, where an Iranian man who introduced himself as Saeed Alikhani told a lawyer he was acting for a company that wanted to set up naval mortgages against oil tankers. The origins of that oil seem not to be as innocuous as he had claimed © Alamy Stock Photo
But their cargoes were not as innocuous as Alikhani had claimed. Analysis of ship tracking data by the FT and C4ADS, a non-profit research group that studies illicit networks, suggests the vessels were used almost exclusively to transport billions of dollars’ worth of oil from Iran, Venezuela and later Russia.
It was also not clear who exactly was buying the oil. Each tanker was registered to a different holding company administered by a different Chinese director with little or no public profile. When the FT visited some of the directors’ listed addresses in China it mostly found men and women with little apparent knowledge of the multimillion-dollar vessels they purportedly owned.
However, phone numbers and other details on the mortgage documents show that some of the holding companies shared links to Chinese individuals and entities placed under sanctions by the US during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Together, the networks identified by the FT shed new light on the systems developed to send Iranian oil to China — and how they have been adapted to ship oil from Russia and Venezuela. The revelations come just as Trump is once again seeking to choke Tehran’s exports and weighing new measures against Moscow.
“This oil network and its suppliers show in intimate detail how tools and tactics used to resist western sanctions have proliferated among sanctioned states,” says Andrew Boling, an investigator at C4ADS.
By diversifying into Russian and Venezuelan shipments, Ocean Glory appears to have acted, he adds, as a “sort of ‘super-broker’ for sanctioned crude”.
The trade in Iranian oil, the Islamic republic’s most important source of foreign currency, has faced various restrictions since 1979, when the US first imposed sanctions following the Tehran hostage crisis.
The net tightened further in 2012, when the EU imposed its own embargo in response to Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme. In 2018, Trump pulled out of a deal signed with the US and others that had briefly eased sanctions in return for Iran limiting its nuclear ambitions, and a year later he ended temporary exemptions that had allowed eight countries, including China, to continue buying Iranian oil without fear of US penalties.
Tankers travel through the Singapore Strait, a major route for oil to Asia. One of the first mortgages Alikhani processed was for a vessel that was later renamed Ceres I, and owned by a Hong Kong registered company © Tim Wimborne/Reuters
“Any nation or entity interacting with Iran should do its diligence and err on the side of caution,” warned Trump’s then secretary of state Mike Pompeo in May 2019. “The risks are simply not going to be worth the benefits.”
That same month, Alikhani asked the Swiss lawyer for help, providing a home address on the edge of Lausanne. The lawyer, who asked not to be identified so that he could discuss the events freely, says his limited background checks, including searching Alikhani’s name against online sanctions lists, did not turn up any reasons to refuse him as a client.
Alikhani was charming and plausible, and the pair met again at Club zum Rennweg, a smart restaurant and members’ club in Zurich. When the lawyer asked for more information on Ocean Glory, Alikhani told him that the broker was owned by an Iranian commodity trader named Amanollah Khalafi and shared a copy of the man’s passport. It stated that Khalafi was born in Tehran in February 1983.
Khalafi’s name, however, did not appear on Ocean Glory’s incorporation document. That listed three directors, who all provided the same registered address in northern India and are also listed as directors of two other Panamanian companies, Sea Glory Circle and Red Sea Ring. They and Ocean Glory were all incorporated on the same day in October 2017. Neither Khalafi nor the three directors could be reached for comment.
Other than these two meetings, the pair mainly communicated on the popular Chinese messaging service WeChat, which Alikhani had asked the lawyer to download. “He said, ‘listen, we deal with the Chinese, the Chinese love WeChat, so we do WeChat’,” the lawyer says.
To administer the mortgages the lawyer acquired a newly established British Virgin Islands company, registering as its director in May 2019, records show.
One of the first mortgages he processed was for $24mn against a vessel named Affluence, an enormous 330-metre-long tanker that was later renamed Ceres I and was registered to Hong Kong-based Chart Ocean Limited. Chart Ocean’s registered company secretary did not respond to a request for comment.
Given the large amounts of money involved in oil trades — Ceres I can carry over $120mn worth of oil — traders usually require buyers to provide a letter of credit guaranteeing the trader will get paid once the cargo has been delivered.
A tanker unloads crude at Qingdao. Analysis of ship tracking data suggests the vessels linked to Alikhani’s network were used to transport oil from Iran, Venezuela and later Russia to ports in China © CFOTO/Sipa USA/Reuters
But since US sanctions meant banks were reluctant to deal with Iranian counterparties, Alikhani told the lawyer that the mortgages would serve as collateral instead. No money would pass from the Chinese buyer to the BVI company, but if Ocean Glory did not get paid for the oil it could call in the mortgage and take ownership of the vessel.
“The procedure was always identical,” the lawyer says. “I received a draft mortgage agreement, I checked whether the counterparty or the vessel was on any sanctions list, and . . . I signed the document.”
The mortgages remained in place for as long as Ocean Glory continued to trade with the counterparty, the lawyer says. Records reviewed by the FT and C4ADS show that in some cases the mortgages were cancelled after as little as several weeks, probably reflecting the execution of a single trade. But in others they remained in place for several years and in some examples, like Ceres I, the FT did not identify records of the mortgage ever being cancelled.
The lawyer ceased the work in October 2019, after his firm stopped its employees from serving as directors at companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the BVI. But he introduced Alikhani to two other Swiss nationals, who continued to use BVI companies to arrange mortgages. One of them retired in 2023 and the other ceased the work in 2024 after becoming suspicious about the true nature of the underlying trades, the lawyer says.
Claire Jungman, an expert in Iranian oil smuggling and director of maritime risk at Vortexa, says this is the first time she has heard of naval mortgages being used in this way.
“It shows the increasing boldness of these networks, operating in the grey zones between maritime law, finance and geopolitics,” she adds. “Since 2019, Iran’s oil trading networks have become increasingly sophisticated and decentralised, reliant on front companies, informal intermediaries and registries willing to look the other way.”
Ship tracking data analysed by the FT and C4ADS shows that after the vessels were mortgaged they immediately began transporting oil from Iran and, in some cases, Venezuela. For example, in November 2019 Ceres I pulled alongside a tanker in the Malacca Strait and loaded, in a ship-to-ship transfer, almost 2mn barrels of crude previously collected from Iran’s Kharg Island before delivering it to China, the tracking data shows.
Of the 34 naval mortgages agreed between 2019 and 2023, at least 19 were signed in September or November 2022, just as so-called dark fleet vessels were starting to move Russian oil in response to western sanctions on Moscow.
One tanker, Skadi, was mortgaged for $20mn in November 2022 in an agreement that remained in place until December 2024. Ship tracking data shows that in February 2023 it collected a cargo of Urals crude from the Russian port of Primorsk and then unloaded part of it on to another mortgaged vessel, An Shun II, in a ship-to-ship transfer off the coast of Spain. An Shun II then delivered the oil to China.
In the two years that it was mortgaged, the Skadi was involved in similar shipments at least five times and in Iranian shipments at least three times, the tracking data shows. The registered owners of Skadi and An Shun II did not respond to requests for comment.
While the mortgages were in place, the various ships moved at least 130mn barrels of oil worth an estimated $9.6bn, according to analysis by C4ADS. Roughly half of that originated in Iran, about a quarter came from Russia and just under a fifth was from Venezuela. Almost all of it — 93 per cent — ended up in China.
In December 2024, Ocean Glory was placed under sanctions by the US for owning another ship that had allegedly carried Iranian crude. Vortexa’s Jungman describes it as “a textbook example of an Iranian front company masquerading as an independent firm”.
Reached by phone in Tehran, Alikhani confirmed he had approached the lawyer in Switzerland in 2019, but said the purpose had been to set up a package of securities for trades involving the import of medicine and agricultural products into Iran, which was permitted under US rules.
Alikhani said he had done so on behalf of a friend in Tehran, who had a commodity trading business. He declined to name the friend and said he did not recall the name of the company, but confirmed that it had a presence in Panama. He denied that the mortgages against the 34 oil tankers had anything to do with oil trades. He declined to comment further when the FT followed up by text message and email.
The port of Kharg in Iran. Crude originating from this terminal was sometimes transferred from one vessel to another at sea before being shipped to ports in China © Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Ocean Glory, which has no website, could not be reached. The law firm that registered Ocean Glory in Panama in 2017 said it could not comment as it had never been the legal representative of the company or had any involvement in its commercial activities.
At least 20 of the mortgaged tankers, including Skadi and Ceres I, have since been placed on US sanctions lists for moving sanctioned oil. Ceres I was listed in December 2024, five months after it collided with another ship in the South China Sea.
The Swiss lawyer said he was told little about the Chinese directors who signed the mortgage documents and assumed the ultimate counterparties were wealthy Chinese “entrepreneurs” who also owned the vessels used to transport it.
However, records reviewed by the FT show several links between the vessels mortgaged on behalf of Ocean Glory and Chinese individuals and companies sanctioned by the Trump administration in 2019.
In August 2019, the Swiss lawyer put in place a $24mn mortgage against Tian Ma Zuo, a vessel registered to a Hong Kong company called Pegasus 88 and represented by a director named Shen Luqian.
The following month, Pegasus 88 and Shen were listed by the US alongside four other companies, including two subsidiaries of China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping Corporation, in the first so-called secondary sanctions against China for trading oil with Iran. Shen was named alongside a person named Li Yi and three other individuals, who the US described as “executive officers” of one or more of the companies.
Li also appears to have been involved in the mortgages agreed on behalf of Ocean Glory. Each mortgaged vessel was owned by a different entity in either Hong Kong, the Marshall Islands or the Cayman Islands — but eight of the companies used the same Chinese phone number, which records show was registered to Li.
A large model of an oil tanker stands at an office in the northern Chinese port city of Dalian, where two Marshall Islands companies that had appeared on mortgage documents were registered © FT
The empty offices in Dalian, where a group of men nearby denied being in the shipping industry and the building’s security asked the FT to leave © FTThe connections indicate that many of the vessels are part of what C4ADS described in a recent report as “one of the largest collections of dark fleet vessels in the world”, probably controlled by a single ultimate beneficial owner in China.
Li, Shen and Pegasus 88 could not be reached for comment. The FT called the phone number registered to Li and sent a message via WeChat but received no reply. In Shanghai, the FT visited an apartment in a rundown block of flats that Li had provided as an address, but nobody answered the door. Another address in the city registered to Shen and Pegasus 88 was in a housing area that had been demolished.
In the northern port city of Dalian, the FT visited the registered address of two other Marshall Islands companies that had appeared on mortgage documents. The tall office block had a sweeping view of the city’s shipyard but there was no evidence of either company. On the 37th floor there was a large model of an oil tanker and a sign for another business where Shen served as a director until October 2019. A group of men nearby denied being in the shipping industry and the building’s security asked the FT to leave.
China, the world’s largest oil importer, has never denied buying sanctioned crude, much of which flows into independent refineries known in China as “teapots”. Last year, it imported an estimated 1.5mn barrels a day from Iran and about 2mn a day from Russia, representing about a third of all imports.
The Hafnia Nile oil tanker burns after a collision in the South China Sea with Ceres I, a 330-metre-long vessel that was later added to a US list of sanctioned vessels © MMEA
In a response to questions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing said China has “consistently opposed illegal unilateral sanctions” that lack UN Security Council authorisation. “Normal co-operation between countries and Iran within the framework of international law is justified, reasonable, and legal, and should be respected and protected,” it said.
Cosco and China Customs did not respond to requests for comment.
Jungman, at Vortexa, says the network of vessels, shell companies and financing arrangements shows that Iran has exported not just its crude but its entire sanctions-evasion playbook.
“Its dark fleet and support networks have become a model — if not a resource — for helping shadow oil volumes flow eastwards.”
Additional reporting by Edward White in Shanghai and Dalian and Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong