The US has quietly seized the cargo of two tankers suspected of transporting Iranian oil as part of an elaborate sanctions-busting scheme involving forged documents and the repainting of a ship's deck to cloak illegal shipments.
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Details of the seizure, which has not been previously reported, were contained in a federal civil case unsealed last month after the Greek-managed vessels discharged their valuable cargo, worth upward of $38 million, in Houston and the Bahamas at the direction of US law enforcement.
The long odyssey that led to the US' seizure began in the fall of 2020 when the M/T Stark I, an Iranian-owned vessel under US sanctions since 2018, repainted its deck in an apparent attempt to disguise the vessel and avoid detection by satellite imagery. On Oct. 31, 2020 it pulled into a terminal at Iran's Kharg Island and loaded full of oil.
Four days later, on Nov. 3, 2020, 733,876 barrels of oil were transferred at sea to another tanker, the M/T Arina. During the dangerous ship-to-ship transfer, both ships turned off their transponders − a mandatory safety device on all large ships − to avoid being picked up on ship tracking databases, satellite imagery and data shared by Jungman show.
