The US sanctioned this fleet's owner in 2024. Seven of its tankers are still sailing, under a new name.

On 18 January 2024, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Hennesea Holdings Limited, a shipping company registered in Abu Dhabi in late 2022, and named eighteen tankers as its blocked property. A The designation, filed under Executive Order 14024 for operating in the Russian maritime sector, covered vessels that had spent roughly a year moving Russian crude and oil products ahead of the G7 price cap. None of Hennesea's tankers were insured by any of the twelve clubs that make up the International Group of P&I clubs — the mutual insurance system covering most of the world's fleet — according to trade press reporting from the same period. B

Six of those eighteen vessels are sailing today under a different registered owner: GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC, a company registered in St Petersburg. A seventh joined the same fleet by a separate route. Between them, the seven hulls carry designations from five authorities — the United States and Canada designate all seven; the United Kingdom designates six; the European Union and Switzerland designate two (AZALEA and ATLANT) — with dates spread across more than two years. GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC itself carries no designation from any of them.

This is not a story about whether Hennesea Holdings' fleet was sanctioned. That much is public record. It is a record of what happened to the ships afterward, built from the same sources anyone can check: primary designation notices, the vessels' own registry history, and their satellite and terrestrial AIS broadcasts.

A short video walks through it.

The fleet, six years and two owners later

Six of the seven were identified by name, IMO number, and MMSI on OFAC's own 18 January 2024 notice, sailing at the time under different names and Liberian-flag identifiers. A AZALEA is the exception: its own designation followed a year later, on 10 January 2025, through a separate action naming its own manager at the time — Avision Shipping Services Private Limited, itself designated the same date — rather than through the original Hennesea listing. It is network-adjacent, not one of the original eighteen, and this piece treats that distinction as material rather than folding it into the same sentence as the other six.

Twelve other vessels named on the same 2024 notice are not part of this fleet. A spot check of several confirms they remain Liberia-flagged under their original Hennesea-era names, with no link to GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC found. The finding here is bounded: six vessels from an eighteen-vessel designated fleet, plus one adjacent hull, moved to a new operator in 2026. This is not a claim about the other twelve.

One vessel in the table needs a separate note: for APEKS, the public record confirms GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC as ISM manager but does not resolve a registered owner. The "GLOBAL SEAWAY since" date for APEKS reflects a management relationship, not a confirmed ownership change, and should be read that way.

The seven arrived at GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC in three groups, not on one date: five between late February and mid-April 2026, and the remaining two — ATLANT and APEKS — in May and June. Designation dates across the seven span an even wider window: Canada's earliest listing (AKHILL, 21 February 2025) and its latest (APEKS, 12 June 2026) sit almost sixteen months apart. The United Kingdom listed six of the seven between 25 November 2024 and 12 September 2025, and has not listed APEKS at all. A fleet moving and being designated on a single date would read as an announcement. This one reads as several authorities working through the same fleet piecemeal, over more than a year, arriving at broadly the same place.

The table above gives the endpoints. The figure below gives the span between them: every hull's management record, month by month, since mid-2022. The gap between Maritas and GLOBAL SEAWAY — nearly three years on most of these hulls — is not filled in with a guess; it renders as unresolved because no manager is on record for it.

The manager who isn't on any list

GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC does not appear on the sanctions lists of the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Switzerland. Its only public reference is a "person of interest" tag in a Ukrainian war-sanctions dataset — a lower evidentiary tier than a formal designation, and one that carries no legal restriction in any of the five jurisdictions above.

Before reaching GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC, every one of the seven vessels passed through the same two Indian ship-management companies, in the same order, within months of each other: Bravo Ship Management Pvt Ltd, then Maritas Fleet Pvt Ltd. Six of the seven show Bravo as ISM manager between July and October 2022; all seven show Maritas between November 2022 and May 2023. AZALEA's own former manager, Avision Shipping Services Private Limited, is itself designated by OFAC and by the UK — not a company with a clean record acquiring a clean fleet.

Where the ships actually went dark

Registry records establish ownership. They do not establish where a vessel spent its time. For that, the vessels' own AIS broadcasts — satellite and terrestrial, covering the full period on our own record — are the only independent check.

Two patterns recur across dated, repeated instances, not single events:

A cluster in the Black Sea, at 41.27–41.28°N, 28.97–28.99°E. ANEMON stopped transmitting at this exact coordinate six separate times between 21 June and 1 August 2026, each time reappearing within 0.2 nautical miles of where it went dark. Two of those episodes — 22–26 July and 29 July–1 August — coincide with AZALEA going dark at the same coordinates on matching dates. Earlier episodes at the same spot, in January and February 2026, were already on record for AZALEA alone. Two vessels, one recurring location, dates that line up independently.

A cluster off Port Said, at 29.83–29.93°N, 32.52–32.56°E. ALYSSUM shows five separate dark episodes here between 21 April and 31 July 2026, all with effectively zero displacement between going dark and reappearing. The longest, 21–31 July, sits between two cargo discharges already on record for the same vessel at the same location.

A near-zero-displacement dark period, repeated at the same coordinates on separate dates, is a materially different finding from a single AIS gap — which can just as easily be an ordinary coverage gap during open-water transit. Several other gaps on this fleet's record, some over 100 hours long, reappear hundreds or over a thousand nautical miles from where the vessel went dark; those are transits, not the pattern described above, and are excluded from this finding on that basis.

What the insurance gap means in practice

None of Hennesea Holdings' fleet carried International Group P&I cover, and nothing in this record shows that changed after GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC took over. B Sanctioned Russian-linked tankers are not typically uninsured outright — a parallel domestic system has taken the place of the International Group, with Russian insurers issuing hull and liability cover, or documentation sufficient for ports and brokers to process a voyage, reinsured through a state-controlled vehicle rather than the mutual pool that backs the International Group. C That system is opaque by the account of trade press covering it, and it is not tested at the scale a genuine casualty would require. For any party assessing exposure to one of these seven hulls, the insurance question is not simply "is it covered" — it is what stands behind the cover if something goes wrong.

This is not one company's story

GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC is one destination among several for vessels that passed through Bravo and Maritas. Other hulls from the same staging pattern moved through a further set of Indian and UAE-registered companies in 2024, converging by mid-2025 on two further managers — Lumen Ship Management FZCO and Centauri Services LLC, both designated by the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, and France — before fanning back out to at least two more end owners.

One of those is Ocean Solutions LLC, also registered in St Petersburg. Its own fleet page lists four tankers. Two trace back through the same Bravo-then-Maritas staging pattern as GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC's seven. A third, KOLOSS, does not: it was identified separately, by a reflag-detection method unconnected to this fleet, as a vessel already under EU, UK, Swiss, Canadian, and Australian designation under its earlier names, that had gone from broadcasting no registered identity to a Russian-flagged MMSI on 10 July 2026. Ocean Solutions LLC became its manager four days later, on 14 July. A hull identified through one method and a fleet traced through an entirely separate one converge on the same manager within days of each other. Like GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC, Ocean Solutions LLC carries no formal designation from any authority checked for this piece.

A fourth Ocean Solutions LLC vessel arrived by a third route entirely — a chain of six further managers with no Bravo or Maritas involvement at all, funneling through a Mumbai-registered company, Charai Sea Shipping Pvt Ltd, which itself manages a further seven vessels not examined here. The pattern repeats past every company we have checked. This piece stops at what has been verified; what has not yet been checked is not the same as what does not exist.

Before any of this began

Three of these vessels carry a legitimate commercial charter on record from years before any of the above started. Vitol SA chartered the vessel now sailing as LAVANDA — itself now under a different manager's fleet — in August 2021, while it was still owned and managed by D'Amico Tankers DAC, a mainstream operator with no connection to this fleet. Trafigura Trading, LLC chartered the vessel now sailing as MIMOZA in December 2022, while Bravo Ship Management was already its manager of record but more than a year before any sanctions action against it. Morgan Stanley chartered DENVER in February 2021, under yet another prior owner, also years before Bravo, Maritas, or any of the companies named above entered its history. All three charters predate any sanctions action against the vessels concerned. They are recorded here because they establish what these ships were before they were something else — ordinary commercial tonnage, chartered by mainstream counterparties, years before any of the companies in this piece touched them.

Evidence and confidence

Every finding above traces to a primary record, a corroborating report, or a limit stated plainly rather than glossed over.

What would prove this wrong

• The Bravo/Maritas timing could be coincidental staging rather than coordinated management, if a wider sample of unrelated tankers from the same shipbuilders and era shows the same two companies appearing in sequence at similar rates. We have not run that background-rate check.
• GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC or Ocean Solutions LLC may since have been designated by an authority not checked here, or in a dataset that has not yet indexed a recent listing. Designation status in this piece is current as of the capture date below.
• The Black Sea and Port Said dark-period clusters rely on our own AIS corpus, which is not continuous coverage for all time. A gap this analysis reads as deliberate cannot be distinguished with certainty from a genuine satellite/terrestrial coverage gap at that specific location and date, though the repetition across independent dates is the strongest available check against that alternative.
• The KOLOSS/Ocean Solutions LLC date match (four days) is a strong correlation, not proof of coordination. A four-day gap between a reflag and a new manager appointment is also consistent with an ordinary administrative handover once a reflag has already occurred.

Method

Every figure above traces to a named source: OFAC's own Federal Register notice for the January 2024 Hennesea Holdings designation, cross-checked against the vessels' own registry and management history as recorded through Equasis and IHS Maritime, sanctions status as published by the individual national authorities and by OpenSanctions, and AIS positions from our own terrestrial and satellite corpus. Designation status reflects a public-record check conducted in early August 2026 and is not a live feed. Ukraine's identification of GLOBAL SEAWAY LLC as a "person of interest" is an intelligence-register identification, not a binding designation, and is described as such throughout. Ocean Solutions LLC carries no equivalent identification in any dataset checked — its absence from every list, including Ukraine's, is stated as such rather than implied.

The dark-period displacement thresholds used to distinguish a stationary AIS gap from an ordinary transit gap are described qualitatively above; the exact thresholds are part of our screening methodology and are not published here.

Sources

A US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Federal Register notice, docket 2024-01245, published 23 January 2024, designating Hennesea Holdings Limited and eighteen vessels under Executive Order 14024. B Lloyd's List, coverage of the January 2024 Hennesea Holdings designation and its fleet's insurance status, January 2024. C Reinsurance News, "Who's insuring Russia's shadow fleet?"

Part 2

Charai Sea Shipping Pvt Ltd's own fleet — seven vessels, four not examined in this piece — is the next thread. So is the third route into Ocean Solutions LLC, and whatever else sits behind the eleven other companies named above. This is a first pass through primary sources, not a closed account.

Use

This reconstruction and video are free to use, but you must credit AIS Dark.

Want the same reconstruction run on a fleet or counterparty you are assessing? Get in touch.

As of 6 August 2026.