(Zero Hedge)—Just over a week after Bloomberg exposed the rise of “zombie” or “phantom” oil tankers—cargo ships that hijack the identities of scrapped ships to evade U.S. sanctions—another clandestine maritime supply chain has emerged, this time revealing how Iranian crude continues flowing into China despite mounting pressure from the Trump administration.
Bloomberg reports that a U.S.-sanctioned “zombie” tanker—Gather View, disguised as a scrapped vessel named Global—delivered 2 million barrels of Iranian oil to a government-run port in Shandong despite a provincial ban on sanctioned ships. Ship tracking data showed the zombie tanker’s port call occurred in late April.
The clandestine maritime supply chain reveals an increasingly desperate Tehran and China’s “teapot” refiners, defying U.S. sanctions and allowing the Iranian oil trade to remain alive.
In a separate report, Reuters reported that U.S. sanctions on two small Chinese teapots have created difficult operating conditions for those refineries.
President Trump has been seeking “maximum pressure” on Iran by disrupting Tehran’s crude export operations with sanctions over its nuclear program.
In March, the U.S. sanctioned Shandong Shouguang Luqing Petrochemical and Shandong Shengxing Chemical in April.
Beijing has previously rejected unilateral sanctions and defends legitimate trade with Iran. China has become Iran’s largest crude buyer.
“Iran needs to be creative because the pace for them to find new tankers cannot really match the pace of US sanctions,” Muyu Xu, senior crude oil analyst at analytics firm Kpler in Singapore, told Bloomberg, adding, “So that’s why we’re seeing them come up with this tactic.”
Last month, Bloomberg identified zombie tankers hauling Venezuelan crude as these new tactics to operate dark fleet operations become more prevalent with foreign adversaries of the U.S.
