Iran, Russia and the New Zealand insurer that kept their sanctioned oil flowing
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Iran, Russia and the New Zealand insurer that kept their sanctioned oil flowing
Reuters-Oct28th2025
AUCKLAND/LONDON – Last Christmas, the tanker Yug cruised out of the Chinese port of Qingdao after offloading 2 million barrels of sanctioned Iranian oil. Near the Arctic, a vessel carrying Russian crude churned through icy seas, bound for India. Six thousand miles away, a third ship unloaded its cargo of Iranian oil off the coast of Malaysia.
The three tankers had different owners, different operators and different clients. But they shared one thing: a small insurer headquartered in New Zealand, backstopped by some of the world’s biggest reinsurance firms.
The company, Maritime Mutual, is run by 75-year-old Briton Paul Rankin and family members. For more than two decades, it has insured everything from tugboats to ferries and cargo ships.
Maritime Mutual has also helped in the trade of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian and Russian oil by providing vessels skirting Western sanctions with the insurance they need to enter ports, according to a Reuters review of thousands of shipping and insurance records, hundreds of oil trades and sanctions designations, and interviews with more than two dozen people with knowledge of the company.
Many of those vessels belong to what’s known in shipping as the shadow fleet – the tankers that transport sanctioned cargoes from countries such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, concealing their trade with fake locations, documents and names.
Maritime Mutual’s insurance coverage has played a crucial role in helping this dark fleet – as it’s also known – to operate despite sanctions designed to prevent Iran from raising money for anti-Western militias in the Middle East and to drain Russia’s war chest for the conflict in Ukraine.
Reuters reporting reveals that the company, whose main business Maritime Mutual Insurance Association (MMIA) is based in a dark grey office building in Auckland, has insured at some point almost one in six of the shadow fleet tankers that have been sanctioned by Western governments, such as the United States, European Union and Britain.
That makes it one of the “big power players” in the industry, said David Tannenbaum, director of sanctions consultancy Blackstone Compliance Services and a former U.S. Treasury sanctions specialist, commenting on Reuters’ findings. “The numbers are larger than a lot of the dark fleet actors we follow that are majors in their business.”
Reuters and shipping publication Lloyd’s List have previously reported that Maritime Mutual covered a handful of tankers that have evaded sanctions, and disclosed some details of its ownership and corporate structure. This report is the first to document the scale of the shadow fleet’s use of Maritime Mutual and the major Western companies that support the firm by providing the reinsurance it needs to help cover potentially huge payouts.
New Zealand – working with partners including Australia, Britain and the United States – is investigating Maritime Mutual over their concerns it may have enabled the violation of sanctions and failed to meet its obligations to deter money laundering and terrorism financing, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The investigation hasn’t been previously reported.
In a statement to Reuters, Maritime Mutual said it “categorically denies” engaging in conduct that breached any applicable international sanctions. It said it maintains a “zero-tolerance policy” on sanction breaches and operates under “rigorous compliance standards designed to ensure full adherence to all applicable laws and regulations”.
Maritime Mutual did not comment on the New Zealand investigation. Rankin, the company’s founder, and his family also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Read more on oeiginal:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/iran-russia-new-zealand-insurer-that-kept-their-sanctioned-oil-flowing-2025-10-28/
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