Upon going through the recently leaked materials from the internal network of ‘Triliance Petrochemical’, WikiIran team has found documents concerning the purchase of two massive VLCC (very large crude carrier) oil tankers.

The documents are partially censored and the real buyer’s name is never specified. However, a few key details have led us to believe that the actual buyer of these vessels is none other than Iranian US designated company, Triliance Petrochemical.

The tankers, BIRDIE and MARAN AQUARIOS, were bought off at the beginning of the year (January-February 2023), at a combined sum of about 110 million USD. Afterwards, both of them were renamed to Yannis and Leonor respectively.

MARAN AQUARIUS’ Q88 form

The first red flag is the existence of such documents and mails in Triliance’s domain - ‘adamco.biz’. Moreover, mail addresses from the ‘lavencol’ domain, a Triliance domain regarding vessels, also appear in these mails. Plus, the guarantor fee for the vessels is paid for Birdie and Maran Aquarius together in one remittance.

Let’s take a dipper dive into the purchase of every tanker.

BIRDIE - matter no. 16DEC2022-336

Birdie is an oil tanker built in 2005, and used to belong to ‘Eastern Mediterranean Maritime Limited’ - a Greek maritime company. Looking at this leaked document we can see a 53-million-dollar SWIFT transfer ordered by ‘Theo Sioufas’ (acc. No. 0072005756017 with Greek bank- Eurobank S.A. BIC) for the purchase of that vessel. Theo Sioufas is an escrow service used to hide the true identity of the vessels buyer, and is ordering many more transfers.

More interestingly, the same file batch contains payments made from an account that its name is covered, but its number belongs to Triliance front company – ‘Gelaris Trading LLC’.

This is not an isolated case, there are more remittances from accounts connected to Triliance to consulting companies and legal services related to the sale of the vessel.

MARAN AQUARIUS – matter no. 21DEC2022-343

Maran Aquarius is a VLCC built in 2005, and used to belong to ‘Lightstream Maritime CORP’. At the beginning of 2023, couple weeks after the purchase of Birdie, it was bought in 55-million-dollar deal. Surprisingly, the order for that transfer was issued by Theo Sioufas (and the same bank account) as well.

Once again, the accounts paying for extra services needed for the vessel reveals the same Triliance-Gelaris accounts.

Further inspection shows many more front and escrow companies, but two of them are interesting in particular. Both names of the companies were censored, but we were able to uncover them by marking and copying it from under the annotation. The first is ‘SM Services FZC’, documented paying for what probably was underwater inspection of the tanker.

The second, and the more interesting, is ‘Henke Petrochemicals’. This company is a known front company of Triliance, who we see paying for additional expenses of the vessel.

To wrap it up nicely, two VLCCs were bought almost simultaneously, by the same party, the purchase is done through a third party and every name that’s connected to Triliance is censored.