“Gatik: The Mysterious Indian Company Disrupting the Oil Shipping Industry”

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In less than a year, an unknown Indian company, Gatik, has become one of the world’s largest shipowners, shipping Russian oil to India for Rosneft.

Writes about it Financial Times.

“From the usual Neptune Magnet Mall in Mumbai over the past 18 months, seemingly out of nowhere, has grown into an international oil shipping giant.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the company has bought more oil tankers than anyone else, going from an unknown Indian shipping business to one of the world’s largest shipowners.

So, in 2021, Gatik Ship Management owned only two chemical tankers. So far, it has acquired a fleet of 58 vessels worth $1.6 billion, according to shipping experts VesselsValue.

However, the origin and ownership of the business remain a mystery, and its corporate documentation is sparse. The group was registered as an exporter in India on March 31 this year but does not appear on India’s official corporate register, the FT reported.

One important clue is that Gatik shares an address at the mall with Mumbai-listed Buena Vista Shipping, another obscure company that reported just over $100,000 in assets two years ago.

Who really owns Buena Vista Shipping and who financed the rapid expansion of the Gatik fleet has puzzled the oil market. But shipping brokers, analysts and commodity traders suspect a connection to its biggest client, Russian oil giant Rosneft, the paper said.

The recently acquired Gatik fleet has been used primarily to transport oil from Russia, primarily to ports in India, according to tanker tracking data.

Financial Times analysis of data from analyst firm Kpler shows that the Indian group has shipped at least 83 million barrels of Russian oil and oil products – enough to meet total UK oil demand for more than two months. More than half of them came from Rosneft.

The total numbers are believed to be even larger than those contained in the Kpler dataset.

“After Western sanctions, it was inevitable that Russian oil companies would want to get into shipping, and I think Gatik is a prime example of what’s happening,” said Viktor Katona, head of oil analysis at Kpler.

“A company in a country that is considered friendly to the Russian state appears out of nowhere, buys a huge number of tankers in less than a year and serves almost exclusively Russian deliveries,” he said.

Western sanctions on Russian oil exports in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 completely reshaped global oil markets.

Western sanctions on Russian oil exports in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 completely reshaped global oil markets.

Rosneft, the Kremlin-controlled oil leader and Russia’s largest oil producer, is at the center of the storm. Rosneft’s biggest clients, Trafigura and Vitol, terminated their agreements with it last year. After the imposition of the sanctions, New Delhi decided to increase its imports of Russian oil, instead of imposing sanctions itself or sticking to the price cap set by the G7.

It was in this context that Gatik emerged. VesselsValue, which tracks tanker sales, estimates that Gatik has acquired at least 56 vessels since March 2022, including 13 in December alone, when the EU embargo on Russian oil began.

According to VesselsValue’s Rebecca Galanopoulos, these purchases have made Gatik one of the largest tanker owners in the world. “In comparison, out of nearly 14,000 operating tankers, most of these companies – 1,361 – own less than 10 tankers; only 20 companies, including Gatik, own 50 or more tankers,” she stressed.

The ships also retreated into the shadows. As early as late March, at least 35 Gatik ships had Western insurance, the condition of which is to comply with the price cap on the sale of Russian oil, introduced by the G7 last December.

However, as of early April, none of the Gatik vessels were insured by any of the recognized major mutual insurance providers.

“The aging vessels in Gatik’s growing fleet have previously carried crude oil around the world, shipping records show. After being acquired by an Indian group, the company began to focus on the Russia-India route.

In this way, Gatik helped facilitate one of the most significant shifts in oil supply in decades. Before the war in Ukraine, Russia supplied less than 1% of oil to India. It now accounts for about 30 percent, according to official trade statistics.

New Delhi did not publicly rebuke Russia for the invasion and instead benefited from millions of barrels of Russian oil, often sold at a higher discount than other buyers.

The exact nature of the relationship between Gatik and Rosneft is unclear: Buena Vista, where an employee said Gatik was “part” of the group, refused to respond to FT inquiries. But the relationship is clearly close, the newspaper emphasizes.

Indian officials who buy oil for their refineries told the FT they dealt directly with Rosneft and not through middlemen. In addition, cargo is now sold on a cost, insurance and freight basis, meaning that Rosneft is responsible for bringing the oil to the port.

The registered directors of Buena Vista are two Indian citizens, Umesh Suvarna Vasu and John Pinto Agnelo.

All but two of the Gatik vessels are registered to companies registered in the Marshall Islands and the ownership of these companies is not public.

However, in a 2016 article in the Russian magazine Pioneer about his love of jazz, Sechin lyrically spoke of one of his favorite bands, the “wonderful” Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club.

“Whether by coincidence or intentionally, one of the vessels in the Gatik fleet is called Buena Vista. The name of its registered owner in the Marshall Islands is Social Club Inc,” sums up the FT.

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