Six Days Dark.

On 7 September 2026, satellite analytics firm SynMax recorded two dark ship-to-ship transfers south of Nakhodka Bay involving four tankers that had run the Northern Sea Route. Two of the four — MIRABEL and PRIMAVERA — sit in this project's identity corpus under different names. Both were designated by the EU on 17 December 2024, as Meridian and Rigel. Both were renamed and reflagged to Oman three months later. They are not exceptions: of 32 designated hulls in the corpus now flying Omani colours, all 22 that changed name did so in the same calendar month they changed flag — each in its own month, across seven separate waves.

A tanker under EU and US sanctions stopped broadcasting its Guinea identifier at a Gulf of Suez anchorage on 28 July 2026. Three days later a Russian identifier began transmitting from the same berth, eighty-four metres from the last fix. The registry records the new name a month later and to no better than the month. This piece dates the change from position data instead, and sets out what the registry alone could not have shown.

Part 6 found one Mumbai manager on all seven of GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC's tankers, and no vessels on its own books today. Part 7 goes back to the month that manager arrived. Six of the seven hulls changed flag to Liberia in the same month Bravo Ship Management or Maritas Fleet took over their safety management — not together, but one at a time across five separate months in 2022. The same shape repeats in 2026, and the second time the flag is Russian.

Part 6 works backwards from GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC's own seven-hull fleet. All seven passed through Maritas Fleet Pvt Ltd, a Navi Mumbai ISM manager whose own fleet page today returns no vessels at all while the company stays active. Six of the seven also passed through Bravo Ship Management Pvt Ltd — which still manages eleven ordinary bulkers and boxships, none designated. One of the two managers looks like a ship manager. The other looks like the six companies Part 4 already found empty.

Part 4 traced DENVER, MIMOZA, MAGNOLIYA, and CETUS/MERIDIAN back to the same small set of managers after Part 2's own six-company layer dissolved. A targeted AIS backfill and independent port-call reconstruction on all four hulls finds the opposite pattern underneath: three separate trade theaters — the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and Russia's Pacific coast trading into China and Korea — not one route serving one network.

Part 2 left open whether six shell companies installed across DENVER, MIMOZA, MAGNOLIYA, and CETUS in early 2024 managed tonnage beyond those four hulls. All six have since vanished from every one of those hulls' own registry pages. Where the tonnage went is not new ground — two hulls now sit with the same Mumbai company that led to Part 3's own discovery, one sits fully inside the same St Petersburg building, and the fourth, already carrying its own EU designation under its own name, has since been renamed.

A third St Petersburg manager, North Vector' LLC, surfaced from the same lead that closed Part 2's open threads. It carries no sanctions designation from any authority checked. All eleven hulls traced to it and its immediate network do — seven of them under a name the vessel no longer sails under. All five are now independently confirmed, by our own AIS tracking, as counterparties to a hub already tied to this network's Gatik connection.

Part 1 traced seven sanctioned tankers to GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC, an undesignated St Petersburg manager. The same shell sequence recurs on four more hulls, passing through six further companies before fanning out to Ocean Solutions LLC, Anemone Marine Inc, and Charai Sea Shipping Pvt Ltd — and a third, independent route into the same network, with no Bravo or Maritas involvement at all. Checked by IMO number rather than by name, every one of the eight hulls examined across this piece carries its own EU designation.

OFAC named Hennesea Holdings' 18-tanker fleet as blocked property in January 2024. Six of those hulls, plus one network-adjacent seventh, resurfaced in 2026 under GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC — a Russian manager no authority has designated. The trail runs further than one company.

A laden tanker lost power off Rügen in January 2025 and has been held by Germany ever since. Two months later its registry stopped naming an owner. A reconstruction of how it traded before the seizure — and of what the record does not support.

France fined the Tagor's owner €1m for sailing under a false flag. Its registry record shows three successive false flags, a twenty-year descent from a BP tanker, and an eleven-day detention in Greece — with the paperwork collapsing on a single day in July 2025.

An AIS reconstruction of the Smyrtos's movements before its 2026 seizure, including a ship-to-ship transfer with the tanker Monte 1 in March 2022 — reconstructed from the vessels' own transmissions and checked against independent records.