Sergey Kondratiev, Deputy Head of the Economic Department of the Institute for Energy and Finance, commented to Kommersant FM about the Russian oil maritime transportation.
It is difficult to say who owns the tankers from the shadow fleet. Bloomberg notes that at least several dozen vessels are registered to Russian companies, but the rest probably belong to offshore firms. So who paid more than $2 billion for tankers? Kommersant FM discussed this with Sergey Kondratiev:
"After all, the estimate of $2.2 billion is quite conservative if we are talking about 400-600 tankers. Such a fleet will cost an order of magnitude more, even if they are very old vessels bought at a discount. As for those who spent such money, these are structures affiliated with Russian oil companies. Not directly. These may be trading structures, or organizations specially created for this purpose. Last year, Russian companies experienced a shock from the cost of freight. This made it profitable to purchase tankers and switch to using their own vessels. Now the tanker can fully pay off in five or six flights."
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