A partner turned in the owner of Petroruss in a Cypriot court.

 

As the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info discovered, oil trader Roman Spiridonov, who owns Petroruss (Dubai), which trades Russian oil, is a co-owner of the large international group Avestra. One of his business partners testified in a Cypriot court about sanctions-busting by Avestra companies, which trade Russian oil and chemicals.

The Avestra Group includes the Russian company Avestra Group LLC, the Swiss company AVESTRA CHEMICAL (SUISSE) AG, the Dubai-based Avestra Chemical DMCC, Avestra Chemical Services Oy (Finland), the AVESTRA CHEMICAL representative office in Poland, and Avestra (Beijing) Chemical Commerce Trading Co., Ltd., which owns a stake in Manzhouli Far East Gas Co. Ltd., which operates a cross-border terminal in Manzhouli for receiving liquefied petroleum gas. This is the only such terminal on the Russian-Chinese border. Avestra's partner there is Heilongjiang Harbin Railway Foreign Economic and Trade Co. Ltd. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Harbin Railway). The same group as Avestra also includes the Ruric fund (Sweden), Mectra Chemical DMCC (UAE), and several Russian companies, including the Moscow-based Khimservis LLC, which received agency fees from the Dubai firm under contracts for the supply of chemicals and petroleum products—specifically, $250,000 in 2021.

 

The group's parent company is the Cyprus offshore company Avestra Group Holding Ltd (Avestra), in which Roman Spiridonov, Dmitry Ivanov, the Ruric fund, Vadim Gurinov, and Igor Berezina own shares. Gurinov is one of Spiridonov's long-standing partners in the Russian oil trade. After the war began, the Russian portion of Avestra's business was registered to Berezina.

 

Dmitry Ivanov, a 64-year-old native of St. Petersburg, has no connection to the Russian company Avestra. However, according to leaked documents, he worked for Russian state-owned oil companies during the pandemic. In one of them, he was the head of the Large Projects Directorate.

 

Ivanov also did business for many years with Roman Spiridonov, who worked at Sibur in the early 2000s. Spiridonov and Ivanov shared several companies, including the St. Petersburg-based Hermitage, which traded petroleum products (liquidated in 2019), and Keri-Service LLC.

 

In total, Ivanov founded approximately a dozen companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, all of which have now been liquidated or are in the process of liquidation.

 

Avestra's oil and chemical product trading business was doing well until a corporate conflict arose between Berezin, Spiridonov, and his business partners. As a result, Spiridonov sued Berezin for $1 million in old promissory notes he had received from a certain Nosyrev. In 2022, Berezin filed a petition in a Limassol court for the liquidation of the group's Cypriot parent company, Avestra Group Holding Ltd. Naturally, his partners did not support this decision.

 

The proceedings dragged on and even reached a Russian court. Spiridonov and his colleagues sought an injunction prohibiting Berezin from continuing litigation outside of Russian jurisdiction, but were unsuccessful. However, Berezin achieved undoubted success, convincing a Cypriot court to prohibit Spiridonov from pursuing litigation in Russian arbitration courts. In the summer of 2024, at his insistence, the court placed Avestra under external administration. It was discovered that funds were being siphoned off from the company through subsidiaries, suspicious loans were being provided, and there were indications of violations of EU sanctions by its entities. Ivanov and Spiridonov's attempt to overturn the appointment of the interim manager through the Cypriot Supreme Court was rejected. Berezina then filed a lawsuit demanding that the group's main companies disclose information about their activities and asked the court to recover damages from Spiridonov and the other shareholders for poor performance. Currently, Avestra Group Holding Ltd is listed as an active company in the Cypriot registry.

 

Incidentally, this isn't Spiridonov's first attempt to use a Russian court to settle a dispute with an offshore business partner. In the late 2000s, he attempted to freeze Samaraorgsintez shares through the Samara Arbitration Court during the proceedings in a British court, but the Russian court also rejected his request.