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 insures about 6,000 ships, the company told Reuters in April. Tankers – vessels designed to carry liquid cargoes such as crude oil – accounted for roughly 8% of that total, the company said. That’s about 480 tankers.
Many of the vessels Maritime Mutual has covered are now sanctioned
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/iran-russia-and-nz-insurer-kept-their-sanctioned-oil-flowing
The revelations expose how a small firm from a U.S.-aligned country became a critical link in sanction-busting trade networks worth tens of billions of dollars. Despite Western efforts to choke off revenue sources for Iran and Russia, the report shows that sanctioned oil continued to reach markets in China, India, and Malaysia, often under the protection of Western reinsurance giants. The case raises uncomfortable questions about enforcement gaps, regulatory loopholes, and the effectiveness of global sanctions regimes.
Maritime Mutual (MMIA): The insurer at the center of the scandal, accused of indirectly supporting sanctioned oil trades.
Paul Rankin and family: Founders and managers of Maritime Mutual, facing scrutiny over compliance failures.
Reinsurers (Lloyd’s, Munich Re, Hannover Re, MS Amlin, Atrium): Major global firms allegedly backing Maritime Mutual’s risk pool.
Governments of New Zealand, U.S., U.K., and Australia: Investigating possible sanctions violations.
Iran and Russia: Beneficiaries of the loopholes enabling continued crude exports despite Western restrictions.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/28/nz-insurer-tied-to-sanctioned-russian-iranian-oil-shipments/
the large volumes of oil transported by the Dark Fleet and the potential cleanup costs for an oil spill involving a Dark Fleet tanker
They estimated that such a pollution incident could cost “from US$859 million to US$1.6 billion” and that likely the costs would be borne by coastal countries as the Dark Fleet vessels “frequently operate with inadequate or no protection and indemnity (P&I) insurance.”
Since the start of Russiaʼs full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dark Fleet tankers have been involved in 50 incidents, including in the Danish Straits and the Turkish Straits, as well as two serious incidents off Malaysia
h/t KeepIt