Coral Energy Was Supposed to Be Dead. Then CUSTOS Appeared

Russia’s war runs on oil money. Oil and gas taxes supplied roughly 30 percent of the federal budget in 2024 — about $108 billion — and record military spending sits on top of that flow. The West never banned Russian crude outright. Instead, the G7 capped its price at $60 a barrel and barred Western firms from shipping, insuring or financing anything sold above it, betting that Moscow couldn’t move oil at full price without Western middlemen.

The bet failed because new middlemen built the web of companies and mechanisms the West withdrew — and Coral Energy sat at the center of it. As Whale Hunting exposed in the Mystery Ships investigation, an intricate web of companies was created to keep Russia’s most precious export moving — at its peak handling as much as 80 percent of the country’s oil exports. The UK government now calls it the “2Rivers network,” named for the trading house Coral Energy became, and describes it as one of the world’s largest shadow-fleet operators and a major trader of Russian crude.

When Western governments blacklisted the network’s companies, tankers and senior executives, the market assumed the operation was dead. It wasn’t.

Whale Hunting spent months tracing what happened next through internal Coral documents, court files and company registries in several jurisdictions. As we reported last year, the network didn’t disappear after sanctions targeted it. It appears to have reorganized.

Now, Turkish prosecutors have been formally asked to investigate whether it has acquired new assets in Turkey, according to documents reviewed by Whale Hunting.

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