Russia’s state-owned Sovcomflot, along with operators of dozens of vessels that are subject to Western sanctions, have been using email addresses on the same private domain — techshipman.com, as reported in an investigation by the American analytics firm Kharon Research.
The researchers examined job postings for seafarers published over a two-year period. Some of the ads explicitly state that employees were being sought for the Sovcomflot group of companies, but instructed applicants to send their CVs to an email address with the techshipman.com domain rather than the company’s official address at scf-group.com.
According to Kharon, nearly two dozen formally distinct shipping companies — registered in Russia, Hong Kong, the UAE, Oman, and the Seychelles — used these addresses. Each of these entities owned or operated at least one vessel under sanctions. Seven operators worked with at least ten sanctioned vessels each.
Among the domain’s users was Dubai-based Moonlight Shipmanagement, which oversaw 27 sanctioned vessels. St. Petersburg-based company Idas, which is not itself currently subject to Western restrictions, owns or manages ten sanctioned tankers. The techshipman.com email was also used by at least five entities within the Sovcomflot group, including South Fleet and Invest Fleet, which have been sanctioned by the EU.
Some formally independent companies shared not only the same domain but also identical email addresses. For example, the same address appeared in the documents of a Seychelles-registered company and the Russian company North Fleet, part of the Sovcomflot group. Three Omani companies owning sanctioned tankers also shared a common address featuring a name that matched that of the manager of all three firms.
The connection between techshipman.com and Sovcomflot had been identified before. In August 2025, Ukrainian firm Dallas Analytics published a letter allegedly sent by an employee of Sovcomflot’s fleet management division to the captain of a purported shadow fleet tanker. The letter came from an address on the techshipman.com domain. After journalists reached out for comment, Sovcomflot’s job postings featuring techshipman.com addresses disappeared from Telegram.
The shadow fleet consists of hundreds of tankers that transport Russian oil in circumvention of sanctions and the G7 price cap. The fleet’s owners and operators regularly change vessel names, countries of registration, addresses, and flags. The use of formally independent companies allows the real organizers of the shipments to remain concealed and enables tankers to be quickly re-registered after each successive owner is added to sanctions lists.
Sovcomflot is also under U.S., EU, and UK sanctions. The company has previously denied that its vessels belong to the shadow fleet and has described the restrictions as politically motivated. A similar system was previously uncovered by the Financial Times. In February, the outlet identified 48 formally independent companies using a different shared email server. They were linked to Russian oil shipments worth more than $90 billion.
The Insider has previously reported on other indicators linking shadow fleet entities to Sovcomflot. One article focused on the companies New Fleet Ltd. and North Fleet Ltd., which acquired ownership of some of the sanctioned tankers transferred to the Russian flag. The companies’ registered addresses coincided with the address of Sovcomflot’s St. Petersburg division.
