A cargo of naphtha leaves Russia’s Baltic Ust-Luga port, by the time it reaches a refinery in India or Brazil, the paperwork says it came from the United Arab Emirates. The chemical product never changed, the origin did. That rewrite happened in Dubai, and the people who learned to write it did not learn it in Moscow, but at Vitol, at Trafigura, and at the trading desks of Houston-based Tricon Energy.
This is the shamed part of the sanctions story that Western countries keep skipping. The infrastructure that keeps oil going from Russia to non-Western buyers is run by the same commodity-trading class the West spent two decades training, enriching, and trusting.
The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre is the free zone known as the DMCC, offers 0% corporate tax, fast licensing, and corporate ownership records that outsiders cannot pierce.
Before February 2022, the DMCC mostly moved gold, diamonds, and farm goods. After the invasion of Ukraine, oil trading there jumped, a shift the US Treasury itself flagged.
By early 2023, researchers tracking identifiable Russian cargoes linked a quarter of the buyers to entities sitting inside Dubai’s free zones.
A barrel loads at a Russian port, sells on paper to a DMCC company, then changes hands again between firms in the same zone before it is ever delivered. Kpler tracking data and Reuters reporting have shown Russian naphtha arriving at its destination only after a stop in the Emirates, at which point it is logged as UAE-origin. The paperwork passes through so many countries and so many owners that no single regulator can say who is to blame.
Forteza Trading DMCC is the cleanest specimen. On paper it is an Emirati commodities firm, but customs databases classify it flatly as a Russian supplier.
It was founded by Dmitry Vinogradov, formerly of Vitol, where he ran distillates out of Moscow and, in 2010, took a seat on the Supervisory Council of LatRosTrans Ltd, the largest Latvian-Russian joint venture in the Baltics and a key operator of the region’s energy-transport infrastructure.
Its co-owner is Elena Vasilieva, who also chairs the board of JSC Petersburg Oil Terminal, one of Russia’s busiest export facilities.
Their ties to Russia are obvious, and it gets worse once you realize there are two Fortezas: One is Forteza Trading DMCC, the other is Forteza Trading Ltd, sitting in plain sight in Astrakhan, a Russian oil port on the Caspian Sea. Same name, two countries, a coincidence? Not at all.
Industry reporting ties the Russian Forteza’s oil trade straight to Dubai-based intermediaries, meaning straight to its own twin. So, Forteza Trading DMCC (Dubai) is the cover story shown to regulators and buyers, while Forteza Trading Ltd (Astrakhan) is the genuine Russian operation doing the actual oil business.
The Russian Forteza’s vessels have been tracked pulling into Anzali, an Iranian oil terminal, which puts the network within arm’s reach of sanctioned Iranian crude on top of the Russian barrels it already moves.
So, Forteza Trading DMCC has a Russian twin, an owner who chairs a major Russian export terminal, and shipping lanes already pointed at Iran. Forget the new trader in Dubai story, that is a Russian oil operation hiding behind a Dubai address.
Forteza’s Brazil business is naphtha. The National Interest nailed roughly 138 naphtha shipments from Forteza to Brazilian buyers.
Brazil’s single biggest fuel-tax fraud runs on the exact same product. According to Estadão, G1, and the ANP itself, the Manguinhos refinery operated by Refit allegedly imported naphtha, or gasoline dressed up as naphtha, and pretended to refine it so it could dodge the taxes that hit finished fuel. Regulators called the place a ghost refinery. The fraud’s beating heart is the naphtha import channel.
So, Forteza pumps Russian-origin naphtha through Dubai and into Brazil. Brazil’s naphtha import pipeline is the very mechanism prosecutors say was hijacked for the country’s largest fuel-tax scam.
The same molecule that lets Moscow keep selling under sanctions is the same molecule that lets a Rio refinery allegedly rob the Brazilian treasury. One product, two crimes, and a Dubai nameplate sitting at the source of supply.
That fraud runs out of the Manguinhos refinery, operated by Refit. And this is where Tricon Energy’s name gets dragged into the room. John Kaweske, founder of the biodiesel venture Bio Clean Energy, claims in his own published account that records tie Tricon Energy to Grupo Refit.
John Kaweske filed a civil RICO action in the Southern District of New York, case number 25-CV-6588, and put Tricon Energy on the defendant list beside Banco Bradesco and a Brazilian law firm.
The complaint alleges that Tricon Energy, Bradesco, and operatives tied to the PCC, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, Brazil’s most powerful criminal faction, ran a scheme that hijacked Bio Clean’s name and contracts to move methanol.
Tricon Energy allegedly got to dump its methanol. The PCC allegedly got the methanol it needed to cut into gasoline. Bradesco allegedly washed the money through its New York branch. And to make it work, John says, the conspirators leaned on fraudulent notarial records to seize control of Kaweske’s company out from under him, then gutted it once he refused to stay quiet. That is how a man ends up locked out of a business he built.
Checking some employees from Forteza Trading DMCC, it showed that there are several members of Tricon Energy’s Brazilian corporate finance team. They moved together to Forteza Trading DMCC.
A team from a major American trading house relocated, as a unit, into a firm that customs databases call Russian. They brought all the knowledge and connections that make the laundromat run: relationships, and the logistics playbook for moving product across borders without tripping a wire. When sanctions hit a company, the company can be replaced overnight, with the same employees.
The naphtha trade feeding Brazil’s fuel underworld, Tricon Energy accused of racketeering inside that underworld, and the Dubai laundromat washing Russian crude all share one hard, undeniable thing. They share the same people. The know-how that oiled one end of this machine simply stood up, dusted itself off, and walked to the other.
So, why does the system built to choke off Russian oil keep getting staffed and operated by the very Western traders it was meant to enlist? Because the sanctions were aimed at the wrong target. They went after entities, vessels, and banks, the things that can be renamed and reflagged in an afternoon. They left the people untouched: mobile, unsanctioned, and paid handsomely to take their Geneva and Houston training to a tax-free desk in Dubai. The West never lost control of its traders to Moscow. It simply never asked for that control in the first place, and assumed a class it had spent decades enriching would choose loyalty over margin. The barrels still moving through the Emirates are the answer to that assumption.
