The US Treasury designated four people and ten entities on Wednesday 4 November in a Chandigarh network that it alleges sold false flag registrations and fake certificates to Iran's shadow fleet, the tankers that move sanctioned oil under false papers1. Eight of the entities are in India, one in Singapore and one in Turkey. The individuals are Suniel Kumar Sharma, his spouse Jaspreet Preeti Shahid, Ashwani Kumar Dhiman and Ishwinder Singh. According to Treasury, the network claimed to act for ten flag registries, including those of Aruba and Guyana; Eswatini, also named, publicly disowned it.
The target sits at the start of the chain. A flag is the first paper a port officer or insurer checks, and a forged registration lets a sanctioned tanker show papers from a flag state that never issued them. Strip the flag and the insurance, the port call and the cargo sale all become harder to arrange. Treasury named no ships this time. On 8 October it designated 22 vessels along with people and firms in India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Britain, among them the Indian customs broker Samudra Marine Services; on 21 October it hit a Panama law firm that it says set up shell owners. "You are either with us or against us," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the release.
The action lands as Indian refiners buy at a record pace. India imported about 5.6 million barrels a day of crude in October, a high on provisional figures from the ship-tracking firm Kpler, with Middle East arrivals back to about 2.3 million barrels a day and Russia's share down to about 35% from 56% in July2. Treasury did not touch those buyers.
