Info:
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) launched an investigation into the Istanbul-based Palmali Shipping for violating the U.S. embargo against Iran and Syria in 2019;
Recep Canpolat of Deniz Haber said port clearance documents from Bandar Abbas on Iran’s Gulf coast showed that one of the vessels, the Agdash, departed from the port in March, before heading to the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates;
Satellite tracking records from May show the other ship, the Agsu, moving off its planned course to Basra in Iraq and heading towards Bandar Abbas, before turning off its tracking device;
The itinerary of the Agsu as recorded by MarineTraffic.com shows it leaving Fujairah on course to arrive at the port of Basra on May 14, but the latest position received from the ship shows it on course for the Bandar Abbas port in southern Iran. The last time the ship sent a signal was on May 13. The ship, which had been scheduled to arrive at Basra one day later, was instead waiting by Hormuz, an Iranian island in the Gulf;
“They only noticed that they had the Automatic Identification Signal on by the time they got to Hormuz, and they immediately shut it down. Here we see that they tried to trick the satellite systems, but they gave themselves away,” Canpolat said. “Even though the trade was between Iran and the UAE, the company is in Turkey, which makes me think how our country will be affected.”;
Through various meetings in Iran, Canpolat said he had discovered that Palmali Shipping had violated the embargo 10 times with one ship and seven with the other while transporting petroleum products;
Mawared Energy used the U.S.-based SWIFT system to transfer payments for the Agdash to Palmali Shipping’s accounts at QNB Finansbank through the R Shipping brokerage company, owned by Igor Raspopov;
A report by the U.S. State Department and the OFAC published on March 25, 2019 under the title, “Sanctions Against Petroleum Shipments involving Iran and Syria”, listed the names of companies violating embargoes, the methods they used and the sanctions against them;
According to the report, a ship named Shah Deniz belonging to Palmali Shipping violated the embargo in 2016 to ship oil from Syria. The ship, sailing under the Maltese flag, was sold to another company and renamed to Zarifa Aliyeva after the incident, but Vesselfinder records show photographs of the ship with the name Palmali still written on it;
The source said Mansimov paid some $200,000 to get out of that situation, and had already been pardoned for violating the embargo;
Industry:
Shipping Industry
Also Known As:
Palmali Group of Companies
Established:
1998
Country:
Turkey
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Astrakhan, Moscow, Novorossiysk, Kerch, Sevastopol, Odessa, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Baku, Bourgas, Constanta, Malta, Novorosiysk, St. Petersburg, Ceyhan, Poti, Geneva, Singapore, and Izmir.
Reason for the color:
» Turkish shipping firm investigated for Iran sanctions violations;