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From the rundown Neptune Magnet Mall in Mumbai, a giant of international oil shipping has emerged over the past 18 months, seemingly from nowhere. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the company has bought more oil tankers than anyone else, elevating itself from an unknown Indian shipping business into one of the world’s largest vessel owners. Gatik Ship Management owned just two chemical tankers in 2021. By April, it had acquired a fleet of 58 vessels with an estimated combined value of $1.6bn, according to shipping experts VesselsValue. Yet the origins and ownership of the business are a mystery, while its corporate records are scant. The group was registered as an exporter in India on March 31 this year but does not appear in India’s official corporate registry. One important clue is that Gatik shares an address in the dreary shopping mall with Mumbai-registered company Buena Vista Shipping, another little-known operation that two years ago reported just over $100,000 worth of assets. Who really owns Buena Vista Shipping and who funded the rapid expansion of Gatik’s fleet has perplexed the oil market. But shipbrokers, analysts and commodity traders suspect a link with its biggest client: the Russian oil giant Rosneft. Gatik’s newly acquired fleet has been used largely to transport oil from Russia, mainly to ports in India, tanker tracking data shows. A Financial Times analysis of data from Kpler, an analytics company, shows the Indian group has shipped at least 83mn barrels of Russian crude and oil products — enough to meet total UK oil demand for more than two months. More than half of that has come from Rosneft. Total figures are believed to be even larger than those in Kpler’s data set. “It was inevitable after the west’s sanctions that the Russian oil companies would want to get into shipping and I think Gatik is the ultimate example of this happening,” said Viktor Katona, head of crude analysis at Kpler. “A company in a country that’s deemed friendly to the Russian state, pops up out of nowhere, buys a tremendous amount of tankers in less than a year, and is almost exclusively servicing Russian flows.”
Source: Financial Times
