Ukraine is preparing to totally block imports of oil products from Romania delivered by water! No ship under Romanian flag will be allowed to transport oil to Ukraine! How UKRNAFTA, an influential Ukrainian company, came to dictate this strategy to corrupt politicians

The story of the Romanian-Ukrainian friendship seems to be coming to an end. Ukrainian authorities are preparing an embargo on all Romanian carriers bringing oil to Ukraine. Basically, the decision is as hostile as possible to Romania for reasons that are hard to understand and justified from a business point of view. The apparent reason that Ukraine invokes is that it has been confronted for a long time with a lot of transporters delivering Russian oil to their country with false documents. Whether it comes from Turkey, Bulgaria or Moldova with ships of private companies under different flags the oil that would arrive in Ukraine would, in fact, also be from Russia.

Under this war strategy Zelensky’s authorities have decided to apply much stricter controls in the first instance to any oil shipments coming by sea from Romania. In practice, this will discourage trade between Romanian companies and Ukraine, and later on it will be totally banned. These sanctions against Romania will be put in place in reality because a number of private companies controlled from behind by Ukrainian oligarchs actually want to have a monopoly on the oil they sell to the state, but especially on its price. In this way free competition with companies from Romania or other neighbouring countries is totally eliminated.

Several players in the Ukrainian energy market report that preparations are already being made at Ukrainian customs for „laboratory” tests to verify the chemical origin of the oil they want to bring into Ukraine. These procedures will greatly hinder the commercial process, even bringing the oil trade relations between Romania and Ukraine to a total standstill. At the moment the influential oil oligarchs at UKRNAFTA, Ukraine’s state-owned oil company, which also has a large private shareholding, have set out to ban oil imports from Romania and Georgia by sea. Any oil transport by rail or road will remain unaffected for the time being.

Ukraine has imposed identical sanctions since last year on companies in Turkey, a major importer of Russian oil. Suspicions were that several private firms were selling Russian oil to the Ukrainian state „relabelled” as being of a different origin. Many of the companies bringing such oil into Ukraine were controlled through offshore firms by Ukrainian oligarchs themselves. They imported huge quantities of Russian oil via Greece or Turkey, loaded it onto other ships and, using forged documents of origin, sent it to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s secret services have started a wide investigation and without any tangible evidence they have put the port of Constanta on the list of ports from where the oil arriving in Ukraine must be checked very carefully and even banned because it would actually be Russian oil.

Who is really behind this embargo?! The UKRNAFTA company, controlled from the shadows by the firms of the Canadian oligarch Evgeniy Svirsky! The CEO of the state-owned company, Serhiy Koretskiy, is a childhood friend of the „Canadian” businessman!

UKRNAFTA is a company 50% owned by the Ukrainian state and 42% privately owned. Over the years UKRNAFTA has been involved in several scandals of corruption and overpriced purchases of huge amounts of oil, but as the country is caught up in the war, no one has investigated these scandalous allegations.

Ukraine has this year significantly increased its import of Oil Products using a fleet of small vessels mostly loading Oil in Greek ports.

AGTG SA and Eco Fuel Trading SA are two Swiss-registered companies dealing in oil and other petroleum products in Ukraine. According to local media, these two companies have totally dominated the import of oil from Greece for many years, together accounting for 75% of all oil imports from Greece to Ukraine.

And this is the beginning of a classic network of companies that basically broker and sell more expensive oil to the Ukrainian state that actually comes from Russia. Through the close relationship between Evgeniy Svirsky, who owns the Swiss company AGTG S.A., and Serhiy Koretskiy, CEO of the national company UKRNAFTA, they try and even succeed in monopolizing the Ukrainian oil market, eliminating through their political influence any form of competition from Romanian companies and not only. The scheme is well known: the corrupt head of UKRNAFTA prefers to buy more expensive oil from his „Canadian” friend, who brings oil from Greece.

Wattsun Holding AG is the name of the Swiss-based group of companies through which the influent oligarch Evgeniy Svirsky makes millions of euros from oil imports from Ukraine. Svirsky hasn’t even tried too hard to keep up appearances, with virtually all the companies in the holding company having the lawyers who set them up as directors.
After a research in the local press in Ukraine, we have discovered that in just 4 months (September – December) of 2023 the national company UKRNAFTA awarded a direct purchase contract, without any tender, of over 25,000 tons of oil to AGTG S.A. at a much overpriced price. At the time, the Ukrainian press drew attention to the links between CEO Serhiy Koretskiy and AGTG S.A., owned by his oligarch crony Evgeniy Svirsky, as well as another company in this dangerous chain, Eco Fuel Trading SA, the two companies that monopolise oil imports and contracts with UKRNAFTA.

The suspicions of the Ukrainian investigative media are that the huge quantities of oil arriving in Ukraine are in fact Russian oil imported by Ukrainian oligarchs through Turkey and then re-labelled in Greece. These suspicions are more than solid given that Greece is not a major oil producer or exporter. The amounts involved in the market for Ukrainian oil imported from Greece are as high as 4-5 billion euros, which is the main reason why influential businessmen have paid corrupt Ukrainian politicians to block Romanian companies from this commercial process.

Recently, Greek refiners have come under fire, in a Washington Post Investigation from November 2023, as the major buyers of Russian feedstock, which transits and gets relabelled as Turkish mostly in the Port of Dortyol. Greek refiners process this relabelled Russian Vacuum Gasoil into petroleum products like Diesel and gasoline. This allows them to sell significantly discounted finished products to the likes of AGTG SA and Eco-Fuel.

The Romanian Government, shocked by Ukraine’s decision to block oil imports by sea from Romania

The Romanian authorities were taken by surprise by Ukraine’s decision which is to come into force in the coming weeks. Apparently no one in the Government or inside the Ministry of Energy expected this hostile gesture from the neighbouring country, so intensively helped by Romania. The strategy of the PSD-PNL Government seems to be „until we see we don’t believe” and most probably a series of „consequential” measures will be taken after this measure becomes official. What is certain is that the economic blow applied to Romanian companies that broker or transport oil to Ukraine is a big one and will certainly make waves at the diplomatic level.
In Romania, but also in the whole European Union, there has been a lot of talks lately about the moment of „Ukrainian reconstruction”, when Western companies will be able to participate in a free market in Ukraine and in the process of economic rehabilitation. However, it seems that no one has taken into account the level of high-level corruption in Ukraine and the fact that the Ukrainians will do everything they can to eliminate competition from European firms from their market.