Since May 2025, five Azerbaijani citizens have been under international sanctions: Tahir Garayev, Akhmed Kerimov, Anar Madatli, Talat Safarov, and Etibar Eyyub. Their company, Coral Energy Group (formerly 2Rivers Group), helps evade sanctions by transporting Russian oil. Their main partner is Rosneft (under US sanctions), and Eibar Eyyub is on friendly terms with Igor Sechin.

 

As discovered by the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, almost all of the sanctioned individuals hold Russian passports: Etibar Eyyub, Tahir Garayev, Anar Madatli, Akhmed Kerimov, and Talat Safarov.

 

Their structures control at least 100 vessels transporting Russian oil through shell companies. Here are just a few of them: Gatik Ship Management, Gaurik Ship Management, and Buena Vista Shipping.

The traders are closely connected to Azerbaijan's elite. Garayev, Madatli, and Safarov are the same age, originally from Nakhchivan, and members of the "golden youth" of the late 1990s. Anar Madatli is the son of the former Azerbaijani ambassador to Ukraine, Eynulla Madatli. The ambassador was named "Ambassador of the Year" in 2014, but then fell into disgrace and was recalled from his post in 2015 after his son, Anar, was fired for "liking" a critical comment on social media. At the time, the younger Madatli was working at the Azerbaijani embassy in Belgium. His older brother, Akper Madatli, was a top manager at Ateshgah Insurance, a major insurance company in Azerbaijan. Talat Safarov was chairman of the board at Ateshgah at the time, and SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state oil company, held a stake in the insurer. It's no surprise that the Coral trader quickly established ties with the company and supplied oil to its Star refinery in Turkey.

Etibar Eyyub is the oldest of the group. He is linked to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and it appears their business relationship began long ago and has since developed into a friendship. At Coral Energy, Etibar serves as an advisor and liaison with Rosneft. However, he also has some offshore secrets: back in 2015, he acquired a company in the Seychelles, MARINE INS LTD. This company was featured in one of the largest legal document leaks of the 21st century—the Pandora Papers. Eyyub regularly flies to Tashkent and Minsk, establishing connections for the oil trading business.

 

By 2020, Coral was briskly transporting fuel oil purchased from Rosneft from a Black Sea port, acquiring products from the Belarusian state-owned BNK refinery, expanding into Israel, India, and African countries, and slowly building a structure with a command center in Switzerland. There, Coral Energy's top managers registered several companies, including Polar Energy at 7 Rue de l'Arquebuse in Geneva—the same contact address Tahir Garayev provided when registering the company in the UK, where the Swiss company Coral Energy was also registered.

 

Furthermore, Garayev's group operated in Latvia, where their representative was a certain Jurius Sokolovs (who left the company in 2023). In Riga, in 2018, the group acquired Venta Energy Services, a company providing financial and consulting services to businesses, and in 2019, they registered its representative office, also in Switzerland. The company is affiliated with Polar Energy SA and lists its address (Rue de l'Arquebuse 7) in its Swiss documentation. Furthermore, Ahmed Kerimov has served on the Riga company's board of directors since 2018. He, too, was a prominent figure in Azerbaijan when he joined Garayev's group. The head of risk management at Azercell Telecom, a member of the board of directors of a major cement producer, NORM LLC, and an advisor to the CEO of Azerbaijan's leading corporate bank, PASHA Bank, Kerimov lives in Switzerland and is responsible for the financial aspects of Garayev's group. For example, about a year ago, Kerimov attended a small event at Arab Bank (Switzerland) Ltd. and thanked its top managers for their collaboration. By that time, it was already known that Coral Energy and a group of Azerbaijani businessmen associated with it were trading Russian oil from Sechin, circumventing sanctions.

 

Terrene Energy is another active Dubai company affiliated with Garayev's group and registered at the same UAE address as Coral. It specializes in India, Turkey, and Russia.

 

The billions earned from sanctioned oil enabled the group's management to live lavishly. Garayev, for example, was a regular in Moscow—his garage boasts everything from Audis, BMWs, Lexuses, Mercedes, and Bentleys. He's flown to Switzerland more than 90 times in recent years, using his Swiss phone number almost more often than his Russian ones. True, these trips weren't always connected to corporate interests: for example, Etibar Eyyoub acquired land in Switzerland and intended to build a family villa on "Billionaires' Hill," not far from the palace of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Valentini, the former leader of the oil company Trafigura, from whom Garayev's Nord Axis purchased shares in Vostok Oil (a Rosneft project) in 2022. However, it is said that sanctions cut off Etibar's bank accounts, leaving him with no means to pay his workers, which is why his property remains an overgrown vacant lot.

Anar Madatli is buying up real estate in Moscow: in 2017, he bought an apartment (92 square meters) in the Arbat area, on 1 Smolensky Lane, in the Freedom residential complex by Donstroy. In 2019, he acquired shares in several non-residential premises on the ground floor of a new building on Demyana Bednogo Street (Khoroshevo-Mnevniki), which is now rented by large stores such as Miratorg. In 2020, he acquired a third of a 560-square-meter non-residential space in the Moskva Tower on Presnenskaya Embankment in Moscow City (Anar Madatli's company, TES, where Tahir Garayev worked, is also registered in the same tower). In 2021, he acquired a parking space next to a new building near Arbat. He also owns an apartment on Vorotnikovsky Lane, in central Moscow.

To be continued