As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, Roman Spiridonov, the alleged owner of the infamous oil trader Petroruss, which trades Russian oil, is part of a large St. Petersburg business group previously headed by the influential entrepreneur Ilya Traber (Antikvar). Spiridonov himself holds Greek citizenship, and his son, born in 2003, received his citizenship in Nice, France.
Petroruss DMCC is registered in Dubai and deals with the supply of petroleum products and the chartering of sea vessels. Petroruss' suppliers include sanctioned companies Gazprom Neft, Gazprom Export, Surgutneftegaz, and Tatneft, and one of its main ports of call is Ust-Luga in St. Petersburg. Petroruss tankers primarily go to India, Brazil, and Egypt.
Since the start of the war, Roman Spiridonov has effectively become a key partner of Russian oil companies in evading sanctions. Belarusian companies are also involved in the scheme: according to leaked documents, in 2023, the corporate email address of the Belarusian company SOOO KhimTekhInzhenering, a trader of liquefied petroleum gas and chemical products, was used to purchase Spiridonov's plane tickets from St. Petersburg to Moscow. This company is also part of Spiridonov's network of companies: Alexander Doroshenko, the general director of Spiridonov's St. Petersburg firm Kontur-S, regularly uses its email address for online purchases. It is known that before the war, RN Trans (Rosneft) was one of KhimTekhInzhenering's largest suppliers in foreign trade contracts.
Documents of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus for 2022 reveal the founder of KhimTekhInzhenering to be the Cypriot offshore company Avestra Group Holding Ltd. He is part of the large St. Petersburg-based transnational Avestra Group, which trades oil and gas chemical products and fertilizers. Avestra's operations span China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Europe, as well as the former CIS countries, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Both the offshore company and the company are registered to Igor Berezina, a resident of St. Petersburg.
Berezina is another member of the St. Petersburg trading group. In the early 2000s, he received approximately $1 million from a certain Nosyrev as a targeted loan for the development of Avestra's business abroad, and these receipts later ended up in the hands of Roman Spiridonov.
Irina Zavarina (who also manages Roman Spiridonov's Dubai-based oil trader Petroruss DMCC) also works at Avestra, according to the conclusion of 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 trading in Russia would not be entrusted to an outsider—just recall the Coral Energy/2Rivers Group network, which, as was previously revealed, is managed by people close to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Spiridonov, on the other hand, came from structures close to Gazprom and the St. Petersburg mobster Ilya Traber.
Spiridonov himself is originally from Orenburg; he moved several times in the 1990s. Spiridonov began his international oil business with Dmitry Skigin (co-founder of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal), Alexander Dyukov (now head of Gazprom Neft), Roman Belousov (a friend of the Skigin family and beneficiary of Platnaya Doroga LLC), Vadim Gurinov (head of Sibur-Russian Tires), and others. In the early 1990s, a small company in Monaco was acquired for this purpose and renamed Sotrama. Skigin Sr. was at one point the head of this firm. Sotrama was the founder of several Liechtenstein companies, including Petroruss, and was officially engaged in maritime commercial shipping.
Unofficially, according to Robert Eringer, a former intelligence adviser in Monaco, it was engaged in laundering criminal proceeds from Russia. It was through Sotrama that the foreign network of companies communicated with the Tambovskaya organized crime group in St. Petersburg. Eringer is an extremely controversial figure, but he possessed unique access to inside information from European security officials and financial elites. A former FBI agent, Eringer served for several years as an intelligence adviser to Prince Albert II of Monaco (with whom he later fell out, went to court, and made numerous disclosures, earning him libel suits). On his website, Eringer detailed a complex money-laundering scheme for oligarchs in Putin's inner circle, citing some of his data from operational reports from the criminal investigation department of the Department of the Interior of Monaco. From an archived publication on Eringer's website: "Much of the money was laundered in real estate throughout Western Europe through a network of dubious oil and gas distribution companies, including Sotrama, a company registered in Monaco, and several companies registered in Liechtenstein, including Oil Terminal, Horizon International Trading, and Petroruss, Inc."
The business partners of Sotrama head Dmitry Skigin (died in 2003) in the St. Petersburg oil terminal were not without cause Ilya Traber (Antiques) and Sergey Vasiliev. Incidentally, the court recently nationalized PNT, ignoring the Skigin family's previous service to the Russian "elites." Prior to that, the terminal was engulfed in a scandal over attempts to redistribute assets, in which Roman Spiridonov was also implicated. This is not surprising: Spiridonov, who had been part of the inner circle of St. Petersburg businessmen for many years, became a minority shareholder in the port back in 2015.
After the turbulent 1990s, the "powerful bunch" came together in 2003 at Sibur, then owned by Gazprom: at the beginning of the year, Alexander Dyukov, who had previously worked for Skigin-Traber's companies, took over as head of the company. Vadim Gurinov and Roman Belousov, who became First Vice President of Sibur-Europe Ltd. in Switzerland, also joined the company. According to leaked documents, Roman Spiridonov was also employed at the representative office of Sibur-Europe Ltd. In 2003, he earned 1.6 million rubles there, meaning his salary was approximately 130,000 rubles per month. Spiridonov's position was clearly not routine.
His Petroruss has several legal entities in various countries. The first, PETRORUSS INCORPORATED, was established in 1996 in Liechtenstein. Then, in 2001, a company of the same name appeared in Panama. Petroruss DMCC was subsequently registered in the UAE, where, according to investigators, it is managed by Russian citizen Irina Zavarina.
Petroruss was liquidated in Liechtenstein in September 2019, with local lawyer Markus Hasler cleaning up loose ends. Hasler has a rich background: many years ago, he was involved in distributing communist literature in Western countries, and after the collapse of the USSR, he helped wealthy Western officials obtain bonuses in the form of vacations in luxury hotels or the purchase of land on Caribbean islands. So his presence in this network is far from random. As early as 2017-18, he and his business partner, Graham Smith, were identified as the heads of the Panamanian offshore company Magalo Investments, which, through a chain of companies, owned a stake in St. Petersburg Toll Road LLC, which had approved an 8 billion ruble "concession" project for toll roads in St. Petersburg with the mayor's office. However, the project has yet to be implemented, and the company was liquidated last June.
Horizon International Trading in Liechtenstein was also closed, with Hasler again serving as the liquidator. It is known that this company previously held 34% of the shares of Sovex, a company founded by Skigin Sr., and where Alexander Dyukov once served as deputy general director. In 2005, LUKOIL, Tatneft, TNK, and Gazprom Neft (then Sibneft, undergoing a name change) served as Horizon's oil suppliers.
The old company was replaced by a new one, Horizon International Trading, registered in the same location (Ruggell, Liechtenstein) in 2019. Markus Hasler was mentioned during its registration; he served as a board member in 2019-2020. A certain Pavel Reiman currently sits on the board, and Artem Tsobanyan, a man with the same name and surname, previously headed a department at the Austrian Gazprom Neft Trading GmbH, also served on the board until 2024. In recent years, the company's supplier included, among others, Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat LLC. In 2025, it was caught supplying fertilizers to Dubai at below-market prices, and in 2023, Gazpromneft-ONPZ and PAO Gazprom Neft acted as counterparties. So, the oil trading laundering operation continues.
