Africa Confidential, November 2024
GAMBIA | RUSSIARussian sanctions-busters find a Gambian havenA US-sanctioned Russian illegally imported US$29 million worth of diesel to The Gambia, sold it there, and sent the money to the UAE, but the authorities seem uninterested
Print this special reportMuscovite Yulia Aleksandrovna Sergeeva, 46, imported a tanker-load of diesel through a United Arab Emirates-registered company to Banjul in April last year, sold it on the local market for over a year, paid no taxes, and exported the proceeds, according to a confidential government report, leaked documents and research by The Gambia’s The Republic investigative website and Africa Confidential. Our own research shows the diesel was loaded in Russia.
Sergeeva has been previously sanctioned by the United States for aiding the Russian economy in the war with Ukraine, and transferring Russian money and assets to the UAE (see Box: The Gambia: where Russian capital stops over on its flight to the Gulf).
Nearly 36,000 tonnes of diesel were loaded at the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk on 2 April last year and transferred at sea to a Greek-owned tanker which then sailed on to Banjul (see Box: The winding road from the Black Sea to Banjul).
Once in the storage tanks of the state oil distributor Gam Petroleum (GP), Sergeeva’s company, Apogee FZC, was able to sell over the heads of the usual importers and distributors into the local market, to their dismay. They complained to GP, which had given over 80% of its capacity to Apogee, but to no effect.
Local company Jah Oil protested to GP in July 2023 about the allocation of ‘the entire available space at the depot to Apogee’, saying it went against ‘all standing norms and procedures’.
It took until late May this year for Apogee to sell off the whole cargo, and in those 13 months it experienced no official interference despite numerous red flags.
Neither Gambian banks, nor GP, are permitted to do business with sanctioned persons such as Sergeeva but the banks went ahead anyway.
The Central Bank of the Gambia (CBG), the local banking regulator, investigated the two banks and wrote in a confidential report, ‘the banks violated the account opening requirements by permitting the creation and/or operation of the sub-accounts, managed solely by the Apogee representative when the company was not registered in the Gambia at the time.’
Another government report suggested they might have breached anti-money-laundering regulations.
GP managing manager Yerro Jallow later claimed GP did not have the resources to carry out due diligence, but a simple search of Sergeeva’s name on the World Wide Web would find her on the website of the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), where all those sanctioned over the Russia-Ukraine war are listed.
Sergeeva then used the sub-account to send the proceeds from the sales to accounts in the UAE without paying taxes or observing exchange controls, according to the documents.
Tip-offs and pay-offs
Complaints and tip-offs soon led the state agency the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to start a probe in October last year. The independent agency has wide powers to investigate financial and commercial wrongdoing but has no prosecutorial role.
On 18 October, the unit had completed a preliminary report, which we have seen, based on banking records and trade data, which it passed on to the Gambia Police Force and the Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA) for further investigation and possible prosecution.
But no further action was taken by those agencies, and none has been taken since, nor by any other regulatory agency. The Gambia police commenced an inquiry but after speaking to the two banks about the Apogee account’s main signatory, according to a copy of the police report which we obtained, ‘the [police] team received directive not to engage him any further’. The police report goes on, ‘Investigation into the matter could not proceed, this report served as a preliminary before instruction were issued to halt the inquiry.’ Who called a halt and why is not explained.
We asked those bodies why they had not moved against the illegal trade in sanctioned Russian oil, bank regulation, or possible tax evasion. So far, none have replied. But a police spokesperson said he could not speak on the subject, claiming the ongoing parliamentary inquiry into Apogee prevented him from doing so.
Although the CBG criticised the banks for compromising their regulations it claimed it has no enforcement power. The CBG received the FIU report in October 2023 but only began to investigate in August 2024, about 10 months later, and almost two months after parliament passed a motion beginning an inquiry into Apogee, which is ongoing, although much of it is in secret.
The GRA has not responded to our questions.
The oil minister at the time, Abdoulie Jobe, who is now Tourism Minister, did not answer our questions and referred us to the GP’s Yerro Jallow.
So, how had all Gambia’s administrative doors been flung so wide open for Apogee, an upstart foreign company? The original FIU report contains the only official hint, saying the unit ‘received intelligence that ‘certain individual(s) are receiving kickbacks (bribes) of 600,000 dalasi [about $8,500] monthly.’
According to the bank statements reproduced in the FIU report, Apogee trader Aurimas Steiblys withdrew cheques for D600,000 monthly from the Apogee account. We emailed Steiblys about his role in the operation, including whether he had been paying bribes, but received no answer.
The Gambian media have been awash with speculation about who might have facilitated Apogee, wondering who could be powerful enough to successfully pressurise the police, the tax authorities and the central bank.
According to a source with knowledge of the police investigation, the order to stop its enquiries came from the presidency via the former interior minister Seyaka Sonko. But Sonko vigorously denied instructing the police to halt the inquiry into Apogee, telling us, ‘Routine police investigations and handling of persons of interest do not require interior ministry intervention.’
‘The Inspector-General of Police has the responsibility of running the said institution,’ said Sonko, who is now Gambia’s ambassador to Cuba. Our questions to State House have gone unanswered.
As November 2023 passed into December the Apogee operation continued unhindered until the entire cargo had been sold. Oil trading sources say the trading scene has gone back to what it was before Apogee turned up.
Local help
Apogee used two local companies, Creed Energy and Ultimate Beige, owned by two Ghanaians, Clement Koranteng and Nana Kofi Amoako Addo, to sell into the local market, even though none of them had licences to trade in oil, a legal requirement which Gam Petroleum apparently ignored.
The operation ran smoothly enough until Creed Energy fell out with Apogee in a dispute over who was liable to pay for some unforeseen expenses, such as demurrage (fines for allowing ships to stay too long at the dock) and the expense of transferring the oil to other vessels. Witness statements and affidavits before the court enabled us to piece the entire operation together.
Their intent was revealed in an affidavit by Koranteng, who said that Steiblys ‘informed the plaintiff that they both have the political and institutional connections to use money to bend the laws of the Gambia in their favour to do what they like with the products.’ Later, Koranteng adds that Steiblys said in his presence, ‘we have the money to buy any institutional or legal authority in the Gambia.’
We were not able to put these remarks to Steiblys, but all other accounts in Koranteng’s affidavits were denied by Steiblys in his own counter-affidavits in the case.
Evidence in the court case indicates Koranteng and Amoako knew that the diesel was Russian contraband. In screenshots of WhatsApp messages to a colleague we have seen, Koranteng nervously advised him not to mention the Zumba, saying ‘no disclosures’ and that it was ‘very confidential’. The Zumba was the ship that sailed from Russia to meet the Pericles in the Laconia Gulf (see Box: The winding road from the Black Sea to Banjul).
When we asked Koranteng if he knew the diesel was Russian and these comments betrayed his knowledge in an email, we received no reply.
After leaks about the operation found their way to the National Assembly of the Gambia, MP Sainey Jawara, of the National Reconciliation Party, tabled a motion to establish a committee which has been holding hearings ever since, some of them in secret.
Speculation is rampant in Banjul about who the recipients of the GMD600,000 per month can be, while most Gambians who take an interest – even though evidence is scant – believe the guilty party is in State House, the residence of President Adama Barrow.
The Gambia: where Russian capital stops over on its flight to the Gulf
The United States-sanctioned Yulia Aleksandrovna Sergeeva and John Desmond Hanafin, an Irish businessman, have been working tirelessly since sanctions were imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to move the assets of wealthy Russians into the United Arab Emirates, according to the US Treasury – and that’s why sanctions have been imposed on them.
They are forbidden to do any business in the US and any assets they have in US jurisdictions will be seized. Moving oil out of Russia is also forbidden by the European Union which also applies sanctions on violators.
The sanctions-busters’ main vehicle is the Russian-based Aquila Capital Group, which also operates in Cyprus, and is under US sanctions. Like many other such operations, including Apogee, it borrowed the name from an established, respectable company, in this case a German investment company it has no connection to. The group and its associates also provide the Russians with passports of neutral countries.
Sergeeva was put on the US Treasury’s sanctions list in May last year but was sanctioned in 2013.
Aquila staff often also work for Apogee, which brought the Russian diesel to Banjul and sold it locally. A May 2023 email in the correspondence between its partner arranging the Zumba diesel cargo to Banjul, Ultimate Beige Logistics, copied in two Aquila employees, one of whom is also under US sanctions.
The operation looks more like the export of capital from Russia, or money-laundering, than the creation of new routes for the export of embargoed Russian oil products. Apogee buys the diesel in Russia with roubles, arranges its transport to a country where questions won’t be asked, sells it there and the proceeds are banked in an Apogee account in the UAE. Apart from the sanctions, no laws have been broken and the roubles that bought oil on the Black Sea have become US dollars in the Arabian Gulf.
Technically, the US could impose severe consequences in diplomacy and trade on the Gambia, especially if the authorities are complicit, analysts and US government officials told us, but it would be unlikely that Washington would take drastic action, given the relatively small scale of the offences and the desire not to appear to be bullying a small country.
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The winding road from the Black Sea to Banjul
The internal documents on the transaction between Apogee and its partners in Gambia shows the 36,000 metric tonnes of diesel left the Russian port city on the Black Sea, Novorossiysk, on oil tanker Zumba on 2 April 2023 according to publicly available data on MarineTraffic.com, a global ship-tracking site which not only tracks movements, but can provide details on what ships are doing at sea and in port (see map).
On 6 April, the Zumba arrived at the Laconia Gulf, off the coast of Greece, where it transferred the diesel to MT Pericles, the oil tanker that then brought it to the Gambia. The tracking data shows the ships lying motionless side-by-side for 34 hours, the only possible explanation for which is that they were transferring cargo from one to the other. Marine Traffic records this period as ‘STS’, or ship-to-ship transfer.
We asked Apogee, and the owners of the Zumba and Pericles – which a few years before had been implicated in transporting oil in defiance of sanctions on Iran – to explain the cargo transfer but they did not reply by the time of publication.
The waters of the Laconia Gulf, at the end of the Peloponnesian peninsula, are often used by Russian vessels loaded with Russian oil products to transfer cargo to non-Russian vessels which can then evade sanctions. The transhipment of this diesel was just one of many in 2023.
According to the Monitoring Group of the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, a pro-Ukrainian government website monitoring sea traffic in Russian oil products in the Black and Azov Seas, there were 15 such tanker-to-tanker transfers of Russian oil products in Greek waters in April 2023 alone. These also violated sanctions by the European Union and the G7.
Ukraine attempted to list five Greek shipping companies involved in trading in embargoed Russian oil products as ‘sponsors of war’ but this led to the Greek government objecting to the EU’s sanctions ‘package’ on Russia last year until the companies were removed from the list. They were removed and the sanctions package was passed later.
The evidence that Zumba was carrying oil that had been ordered by Apogee is in WhatsApp and email messages we have obtained which link Zumba to the diesel being loaded in Novorossiysk.
The Pericles arrived in Gambia on 22 April but it was too large to dock there and three other tankers, the Bruno, the Baldo and the Caesar, were used to ferry the cargo to shore.
At least 27,337 tonnes of diesel, according to the receipts, were deposited at the Gam Petroleum and when the facilities there were full, the remaining stock was deposited at the country’s only private storage facility owned by Castle, General Petroleum Service.
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