Oil Tankers In Disguise
An independent monitoring company, TankerTrackers, identified Young Yong, a Chinese-owned supertanker, as shipping Venezuelan oil in 2021 disguised using false documents as Malaysian crude oil. The Young Yong was sanctioned in November 2022 for shipping oil from Iran, a state also subject to sanctions and known to have used false documents to disguise the origin of its cargo. Iran and Venezuela are two oil-producing sanctioned states and close allies that signed a 20-year cooperation plan in July 2022 for the oil and petrochemical industries. In a swap agreement signed in 2021, Iran and Venezuela decided to exchange Iranian crude oil condensate for Venezuelan crude oil. Julia Tsarnas from the South America team joins Salomon Montaguth to try and better understand the real impact this may have worldwide.