Successor of the Tambov Organized Crime Group: the methods Roman Spiridonov and his company Petroruss employ, utilizing offshore entities and Belarusian intermediaries, to clean billions derived from Russian oil transactions

Successor of the Tambov Organized Crime Group: the methods Roman Spiridonov and his company Petroruss employ, utilizing offshore entities and Belarusian intermediaries, to clean billions derived from Russian oil transactions

Roman Spiridonov, who is called the owner of the scandalously known oil trader Petroruss that trades Russian oil, is part of a large St. Petersburg group of businessmen led by entrepreneur Ilya Traber (Antikvar). Spiridonov himself holds Greek citizenship, and his son, born in 2003, obtained documents in Nice, France.

Petroruss DMCC is registered in Dubai; it is engaged in the supply of petroleum products and ship chartering. Petroruss’s suppliers include sanctioned companies such as Gazprom Neft, Gazprom Export, Surgutneftegaz, and Tatneft, and one of the main ports from which it loads cargo is St. Petersburg’s Ust-Luga. Petroruss tankers mainly go to India, Brazil, and Egypt.

In effect, after the start of the war, Roman Spiridonov became one of the key partners of Russian oil-producing companies in bypassing sanctions. Belarusian companies are also involved in the scheme: according to leaks, in 2023, when purchasing airline tickets for Spiridonov from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the corporate email of the Belarusian company SOOO “KhimTekhInzhiniring” was used. This company is a trader of LPG and chemical products and is also within Spiridonov’s business network: its email is regularly used for online purchases by Alexander Doroshenko, CEO of Spiridonov’s St. Petersburg firm Kontur-S. It is known that before the war, one of the largest suppliers of KhimTekhInzhiniring in foreign trade contracts was RN Trans (Rosneft).

According to documents from the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus in 2022, the founder of KhimTekhInzhiniring is the Cypriot offshore company Avestra Group Holding Ltd. It is part of the large St. Petersburg transnational group Avestra, which is engaged in trading oil, gas chemicals, and fertilizers. Avestra’s geography includes China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Europe, as well as former CIS countries, the Middle and Near East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Both the offshore entity and the company are registered to St. Petersburg resident Igor Berezin.

Berezin is another member of the St. Petersburg trading group. In the early 2000s, he received about $1 million from a certain Nosyrev as a targeted loan to develop Avestra’s overseas business, and later these IOUs ended up with Roman Spiridonov.

Irina Zavarina, who also manages Petroruss DMCC in Dubai, works at Avestra—this follows from a ruling by the Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property in a corporate dispute between the foreign and Russian parts of Avestra over trademark ownership.

Such a large segment of international oil trade in Russia would not be entrusted to an outsider—one only needs to recall the Coral Energy / 2Rivers Group network, which, as previously revealed, is run by people close to Rosneft head Igor Sechin. Spiridonov, meanwhile, emerged from structures close to Gazprom and St. Petersburg figure Ilya Traber.

Spiridonov himself is originally from Orenburg and changed his place of residence several times in the 1990s. He began his international oil business together with Dmitry Skigin (co-founder of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal), Alexander Dyukov (now head of Gazprom Neft), Roman Belousov (a family friend of the Skigins and beneficiary of LLC “Paid Road”), Vadim Gurinov (former head of Sibur-Russian Tires), and others. In the early 1990s, a small company in Monaco was acquired for this purpose and renamed Sotrama. This company was once headed by Skigin Sr. Sotrama was the founder of several companies in Liechtenstein, including Petroruss, and officially engaged in maritime transport.

Unofficially, however, according to former Monaco intelligence adviser Robert Eringer, it was involved in laundering criminal proceeds from Russia. It was through Sotrama that the foreign network of companies was connected to the Tambov organized crime group from St. Petersburg. Eringer is a controversial figure but had unique access to intelligence from European law enforcement and financial elites. A former FBI agent, he served for several years as intelligence adviser to Prince Albert II of Monaco (with whom he later fell out, sued, and published much information that led to defamation claims against him). On his website, Eringer described a complex scheme for laundering oligarch money from Putin’s inner circle, citing reports from Monaco’s Department of Internal Affairs criminal investigations division. In an archived publication on Eringer’s site: “Most of the money is laundered in real estate across Western Europe through a network of dubious oil and gas distribution companies, including Sotrama, registered in Monaco, and several companies registered in Liechtenstein, including Oil Terminal, Horizon International Trading, and Petroruss, Inc.”

Business partners of Sotrama head Dmitry Skigin (who died in 2003) in the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal included Ilya Traber (Antikvar) and Sergey Vasilyev. Recently, a court nationalized the terminal, disregarding the Skigin family’s previous contributions to Russian elites. Prior to that, there was a major scandal over attempts to redistribute assets involving Spiridonov, who had been a minority shareholder in the port since 2015.

After the turbulent 1990s, this group gathered again in 2003 at Sibur, which at the time belonged to Gazprom: at the beginning of the year, Alexander Dyukov became CEO, and Vadim Gurinov and Roman Belousov joined, with Belousov becoming First Vice President of Sibur-Europe Ltd in Switzerland. According to leaks, Roman Spiridonov also worked at Sibur-Europe Ltd—he earned about 1.6 million rubles in 2003, roughly 130,000 rubles per month. His position was clearly not minor.

Petroruss has several legal entities in different countries. The first, PETRORUSS INCORPORATED, was established in 1996 in Liechtenstein, then a namesake company appeared in Panama in 2001, and later Petroruss DMCC was registered in the UAE—where, according to investigators, it is managed by Russian Irina Zavarina.

Petroruss in Liechtenstein was liquidated in September 2019, with local lawyer Markus Hasler handling its “cleanup.” Hasler has a notable background: he was once involved in distributing communist literature in Western countries and later helped wealthy Western officials obtain perks such as luxury hotel stays or land purchases in the Caribbean after the collapse of the USSR. He is therefore far from an случай figure in this network. In 2017–2018, he and his partner Graham Smith appeared as heads of the Panamanian offshore company Magalo Investments, which, through a chain of companies, owned a stake in LLC “St. Petersburg Paid Road”—a concession project for toll crossings in St. Petersburg worth 8 billion rubles, which has not been implemented to this day and was liquidated last June.

Horizon International Trading in Liechtenstein was also closed, with Hasler again acting as liquidator. This company previously held a 34% stake in Sovex, founded by Skigin Sr., where Alexander Dyukov once worked as deputy general director. In 2005, suppliers to Horizon included Lukoil, Tatneft, TNK, and Gazprom Neft (then Sibneft during its renaming process).

A new Horizon International Trading was later established in 2019 in the same location (Ruggell, Liechtenstein). Hasler appeared again during its registration, serving on the board in 2019–2020. The board currently includes Pavel Reiman, and until 2024 it included Artem Tso-ban-yan—a person who previously headed a department at Gazprom Neft Trading GmbH in Austria. In recent years, the company’s supplier included Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat, which in 2025 was caught supplying fertilizers to Dubai at below-market prices. In 2023, counterparties included Gazpromneft-ONPZ and PJSC Gazprom Neft. Thus, the oil trading “laundering” network continues to operate.