Oil sanctions loophole? How a Swiss oil trader may be linked to Russia via Dubai
Petraco may be linked to Russia (photo from open sources)
New details about a secret agreement to settle debts tied to Russian fuel supplies through Moscow-based banks have emerged. The scheme allegedly involved Switzerland's Petraco as well as intermediary companies based in Dubai.
Read more in the story below.
$3.5 million deal
On March 28, 2025 - three years into Russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine, and more than three years after the G7 imposed its price cap on Russian crude - three companies signed a document in Dubai. It was titled, plainly, "Agreement No. 12".
The signatories were EDURC Company DMCC, a Dubai shell directed by Gulmirza Javadov; LLC Oil Technologies, a Moscow-registered company represented by Turzhov A.A.; and Petraco Energies DMCC - the Dubai operational arm of Petraco Oil Company SA, one of the oldest and most prestigious commodity trading houses in the world, headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland.
The subject was a debt of $3,537,785. Petraco Energies would pay that sum on behalf of EDURC to Oil Technologies, settling obligations arising from contracts for the supply of petroleum products. The money would flow through Moscow banks. The pricing formula was pegged to Platts ICE Brent at a discount of $11.82 per barrel - the characteristic markdown applied to Russian crude grades expelled from Western markets.
On paper, it was a routine commodity trade settlement. Three companies. A debt. A payment. Done. It was not done. It was deliberate, structured, and deeply revealing. In the middle of the most consequential sanctions regime in modern history, a Swiss institution of fifty years’ standing was quietly paying Russian oil suppliers through Moscow banks, using a Dubai vehicle to sanitize the transaction.
The trader from Lugano
Petraco Oil Company SA was founded in Milan in 1972. Over five decades, it became a formidable force in global commodity trading, handling over 500,000 barrels of crude oil, petroleum products, feedstocks, and blending stocks every day. Its clients included national oil companies, multinationals, and major industrial utilities. It cultivated an image of discretion, expertise, and longevity.
It was not Vitol or Trafigura, companies forced into public accountability by scale and scandal. Petraco was quieter. More careful. It operated, as it preferred, in the spaces between producers and buyers that no one scrutinised too closely. Among those spaces, before February 2022, were contracts for Russian crude production.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, those relationships became a liability for everyone except Petraco. The United States imposed sanctions within weeks. But Petraco was Swiss. The EU’s oil embargo would not come into effect until December 2022. So for the better part of a year, while Ukrainian civilians died under Russian bombardment, Petraco and other European traders continued to buy Russian barrels - legally, profitably, and in full view.
Oil prices had spiked following the invasion. The margins on Russian crude were exceptional precisely because others were walking away. For those willing to stay, it was, as Global Witness documented, a moment to "cash in on skyrocketing prices caused by the invasion" - loading the Kremlin’s war chest with every cargo lifted.
When journalists from Global Witness and NPR contacted Petraco for comment in 2022, the company declined to respond. It issued no public statement about its Russian exposure. It did not pledge to exit. It committed to nothing. In the commodity trading world, silence from a major house on its Russian business is a statement in itself: we are still trading, and we prefer you not know the details.
By 2023, the picture had changed - legally, if not operationally. The EU embargo was in place. The G7 price cap was live. The correct response from a compliant trading house would have been to wind down Russian exposure entirely and document that wind-down clearly.
Petraco’s response, the evidence suggests, was to keep operating - through Dubai, through intermediaries, and through the deliberate obscurity that DMCC corporate structures provide.
The architecture of deniability
Petraco Energies DMCC occupies Unit 1007, SABA 1, Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai. It is approved by S&P Global Platts as a participant in the Platts Market on Close process - the benchmark-setting mechanism for global crude prices. On the surface, a legitimate trading entity. But the choice of Dubai is not incidental. It is structural.
The practical consequence is that a Swiss trading house with European institutional relationships, Western bank financing, and a fifty-year reputation for respectability can route its Russian crude transactions through a Dubai entity - keeping the dirty end of the trade at arm’s length from anything that touches Western regulators, Western banks, or Western law.
"Agreement No. 12" makes this architecture explicit. A Russian company - Oil Technologies, Moscow - sold petroleum products to EDURC Company DMCC in Dubai. EDURC accumulated a $3.5m debt. Petraco Energies DMCC stepped in to discharge that debt on EDURC’s behalf. The payments flowed through Russian bank accounts - institutions operating under the financial system of the very state whose oil revenues the G7 has spent three years trying to curtail.
A related contract amendment shows EDURC purchasing crude from Oil Technologies under FOB terms - meaning the Russian seller’s obligation ends at the Russian port of loading. Priced at an $11.82 per barrel discount to ICE Brent - the characteristic markdown for Russian crude that cannot find Western buyers.
Follow the chain: Moscow seller, Dubai front (EDURC), Swiss-Dubai financial conduit (Petraco Energies), Russian banks. Every link is constructed to be dismissible. Petraco Energies is not acquiring Russian oil — it is retiring a third-party liability. EDURC is not a Petraco affiliate — it is an independent entity. The Russian banks are not financing sanctions evasion — they are processing an ordinary interbank transfer. And at the terminus of this chain, the Russian state receives its money.
EDURC: The indispensable front
EDURC Company DMCC is not a company that normally attracts attention. It has no public profile, no press releases, no LinkedIn presence. It is registered at the Preatoni Tower, Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai, and it does not advertise what it does.
What it does, based on the available evidence, is serve as a cargo-entitlement vehicle - a legal entity that takes title to oil cargoes, absorbs contractual obligations, and sits between Russian sellers and the wider trading network, providing a layer of insulation that obscures the ultimate beneficiary of the trade.
This function was explicitly identified in litigation arising from a West African joint venture. GMP Energy, a Ghanaian oil company in partnership with Petraco Energies DMCC, stated in proceedings that EDURC Company DMCC was "an entity introduced by Petraco to assume entitlements under each cargo". Petraco brought EDURC into the venture specifically, GMP alleged, to receive cargo entitlements and process financial flows - and neither Petraco nor EDURC subsequently complied with GMP’s requests for a formal audit of the transactions, leaving freight costs, hedging charges, and purchase prices entirely unverified.
The pattern this reveals is the standard operating model of the modern sanctions-evasion architecture. No single company handles the full chain. Roles are compartmentalised. A Western-credentialed house like Petraco provides financing, market access, and the Platts price discovery that gives the structure legitimacy. A purpose-built Dubai entity like EDURC takes legal title and absorbs counterparty risk. Russian sellers provide the product. Moscow banks process the payments.
And when regulators or partners demand transparency, every party points to the others and declares itself merely a participant in a lawful commercial transaction. This is the architecture of deniability scaled to an industrial level.
What it proves
The sum in "Agreement No. 12" is not enormous by the standards of global crude trading. Three and a half million dollars is a single cargo, or less. But its significance lies not in its size but in what it proves.
It proves that as late as March 2025, Petraco Energies DMCC was maintaining active, documented financial relationships with Russian oil suppliers - settling debts through Russian banking infrastructure on behalf of a Dubai cargo vehicle. This was not a legacy position being wound down. "Agreement No. 12" was executed, signed, notarised, and delivered. It created new obligations. It directed new payments into Russian bank accounts.
It proves that the discount structure - $11.82 per barrel below ICE Brent - was built into the pricing formula. Russian crude, sanctioned in principle and discounted in practice, was moving through this network at prices that reflect its pariah status in Western markets while still generating revenue for the Russian state. It proves that EU Regulation 833/2014 - the legal backbone of EU Russia sanctions - was being systematically circumvented through structures designed to resist exactly the kind of tracing that "Agreement No. 12", fortuitously, makes possible.
Most damningly, it proves that the institutional respectability of a fifty-year-old Swiss trading house was being actively deployed to legitimise, finance, and perpetuate the export of Russian oil revenues at a moment when those revenues were directly funding the continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities.
The network’s other architect: Etibar Eyyub
Petraco and EDURC do not operate in isolation. The broader network of Dubai-based enablers that keeps Russian oil moving has a face - and in December 2025, the EU put a name to it. Etibar Eyyub, an Azerbaijani businessman, was sanctioned by the European Union for founding and running a network of companies through which Russian oil, notably from Rosneft, was shipped and exported with its actual origin concealed.
The EU determined that Eyyub’s network controlled a large proportion of Russia’s shadow fleet vessels, systematically undermining EU Regulation No 833/2014. The UK followed with its own designation, as part of what it described as its largest package of Russia sanctions since the early months of the conflict, targeting 175 entities across Eyyub’s network.
Bloomberg reported that the network had been instrumental in keeping hundreds of millions of barrels of Russian crude flowing despite Western restrictions. Representatives for Eyyub’s companies did not respond to requests for comment.
The reckoning that has not come
The EU has sanctioned hundreds of entities for involvement in Russian oil evasion. The UK has designated shadow fleet operators and their management companies. The United States, in January 2025, imposed its most sweeping energy sector sanctions yet, targeting Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegas, and over 180 vessels.
Petraco Oil Company SA and its Dubai arm, Petraco Energies DMCC, do not appear on any of these lists. They continue to operate. Petraco Energies continues to participate in Platts price benchmarking. The Swiss parent continues to manage its 500,000 barrels per day trading book. And "Agreement No. 12" - signed, sealed, and sent - sits as documentary evidence of what that operation, in practice, involves.
This is the reckoning that has not come: the accountability of the Western-credentialed enablers. The most visible Russian oil operators in Dubai have attracted sanctions and scrutiny. The Russian producers have been designated.
But the Swiss trading houses that provide the financing, the market access, and the institutional credibility that make the whole system function - they continue to operate behind a wall of legal structuring, jurisdictional distance, and the deliberate obscurity that a DMCC subsidiary and a three-party debt settlement provide.
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"Agreement No. 12" is a small document. But what it reveals is a systemic failure, refusal, or inability of Western enforcement to reach the entities that give it legitimacy, the firms whose participation transforms Russian crude from a sanctioned commodity into a traded one, and whose continued operation makes every barrel of it possible.
