Mostly harmless. Some assembly required.

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  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 3rd, 2023
  • TheThirdAccount@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•US seizes nearly 1 million barrels of Iranian oil allegedly bound for China
    8·
    1 year ago

    Eh, for one we are hyper specialized oil company so not quite as evil as your run of the mill ones. We sell fuel to ships, so unless everyone suddenly agrees they don’t need the 90% of the world’s commodities and manufactured goods anymore, you gotta use ships. And in a moderate defense, ships by far the least polluting way to transport stuff by ton/mile.

    Me personally I’m a big old lefty, even here within the EU’s context (where the American Democrats would be a center-right party).I just fell into this role and happened to be good at it. My function is far too niche for any green energy projects. At the core of what we do and the bit I supervise, we are basically providing short term liquidity to shipping companies, since you sell fuel on unsecured credit. Believe me I’ve looked (and keep looking) at green and adjacent spaces.

  • TheThirdAccount@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•US seizes nearly 1 million barrels of Iranian oil allegedly bound for China
    674·
    1 year ago

    There is a lot of misreporting and misunderstanding about this. OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) exists within Treasury and is responsible for enforcing sanctions usually created by executive order (“EO”), or very rarely, Congress. EOs and OFAC interpretation are very specific: some sanctions, such as the ones on the export of Iranian crude/products, are explicitly extraterritorial. Meaning, the US reserves the right to come after you no matter what country you are a citizen of or where you company is domiciled. It’s very rare for them to try this one anyone who doesn’t have US nexus since there is not much practically speaking they can do, but they could in theory. OFAC has, no pun intended, FAQs for all of this easily found at their site.

    Now, this case was extra stupid. Oaktree is the single biggest PE investor in shipping, going in heavy starting a bit before the financial crash and going in really big with Eagle Bulk c. 2012 or so. Oaktree is, as stated, a US company, but that wasn’t the main reason: they did this transaction in USD. Which was stupid, but having met the bastards at Empire a few times, I can say they are not the brightest bunch (as as far as I understand they are doing most of this kind of work in EUR with some shady banks nowadays anyway). Anyway any transaction in USD goes through the SWIFT system (which is why kicking Russia out of it was such a massive deal). This means there was simply no way this was not going to get eventually scanned since banks have repurposed their AML programs into sanctions programs or subscribe to sanctions-specific services like PoleStar’s PupleTrac (what my company uses) or Windward or Lloyd’s, etc. Now the dirty secret is that the banks don’t really understand movement data that well, but Empires has done this (and Venezuela) so often for so long, someone at Treasury probably said, “OK, since we got Oaktree all up in this, let’s make an example of of these guys to scare others away from these trades.”

    [spoiler alert: it did not scare others away from these trades and most folks estimate there are about 1,000 large tankers that form a so called “Dark Fleet” trading in Iran, Venezuela, and now Russia since both crude and product have broken the price cap at all Russian export locations. You cam make about 40% more shipping such cargos than legal ones.]

    Anyway, I digress, The the point is that OFAC doesn’t care if you have US nexus; it just makes you easier to catch if you do. Source: I am the head of credit and compliance for a large oil company that works closely with the shipping industry.