Leaked documents reveal a staggering worth of oil exports, routed through a complex web of ship-to-ship transfers and covert operations.

Our recent studies have shed significant light on the Iranian Armed Forces’ petroleum trading arm, Sepehr Energy Jahan, and its clandestine counterparts, revealing a crucial fact: they have sold off unprecedented amounts of oil. To gain a clearer understanding of these transactions, the WikIran team has have been meticulously tracking every transaction and shipment to compile, as accurately as possible, a comprehensive “sales book”. Leaked documents from SEJ have revealed a staggering $4.77 billion worth of oil exports, routed through a complex web of ship-to-ship transfers and covert operations. At the heart of this scandal are 40 Oil shipments, totaling 60,308,112 barrels, valued at $4.22 billion. These shipments were discharged in China by 34 tankers. However, our investigation has also uncovered eight AFGS shipments, with an equal number of vessels, worth a massive amount of $548 million, although we were unable to locate discharge evidence for these shipments.

Compiling Sepehr Energy Jahan’s “Sales Book"

According to SEJ’s contracts, oil is only discharged after all payments have been finalized. Therefore, discharged oil is considered fully sold, with payment received in full:

Two document formats are particularly reliable and informative: Delivery Notices and inspection companies’ discharge summaries. These documents confirm that discharge has occurred, specify discharged quantities, and provide additional information:

Example of two types of documents that overlap for the same discharge.

Identifying additional oil deals without discharge documents have been more complex and labor-intensive. To address this challenge, we identified all the tankers mentioned in the materials and cross-referenced their loading and STS (Ship-to-Ship) documents with the shipments known to have been discharged (and therefore sold) to eliminate any duplicities. This enabled us to effectively identify additional shipments made by SEJ, even when discharge evidence was not available.

This is an example of a document (Bill of Lading) suggesting that petroleum (Iranian, disguised as Malaysian) was shipped aboard the MT RITI. Although we were unable to find discharge documents for this tanker in the available materials, it is still plausible that the oil was later sold, and the quantity was calculated accordingly – and categorized in the second category of the "sales book".

The full set of documents supporting this article is available for download here.

Table of Verified Discharged SEJ Petroleum Shipments

Table of SEJ Shipments Identified, in Transit Without Discharge Records