A Cyprus offshore company, a Chinese terminal, and EU sanctions: how oil trader Roman Spiridonov uses Avestra to trade Russian oil and chemicals, circumventing restrictions
11:23, 17 августа 2026 г.
Oil trader Roman Spiridonov, who owns Petroruss (Dubai), a company that trades Russian oil, is a co-owner of the large international group Avestra. One of his business partners testified in a Cypriot court about sanctions evasion by Avestra companies, which trade Russian oil and chemicals.
The Avestra Group includes the Russian company Avestra Group LLC, the Swiss company AVESTRA CHEMICAL (SUISSE) AG, the Dubai-based Avestra Chemical DMCC, Avestra Chemical Services Oy (Finland), the AVESTRA CHEMICAL representative office in Poland, and Avestra (Beijing) Chemical Commerce Trading Co., Ltd., which owns a stake in Manzhouli Far East Gas Co. Ltd., which operates a cross-border terminal in Manzhouli for receiving liquefied petroleum gas. This is the only such terminal on the Russian-Chinese border.
Avestra’s partner there is Heilongjiang Harbin Railway Foreign Economic and Trade Co. Ltd. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Harbin Railway). Avestra’s group also includes the Ruric fund (Sweden), Mectra Chemical DMCC (UAE), and several Russian companies, including Moscow-based Khimservis LLC, which received agency fees from the Dubai firm under contracts for the supply of chemicals and petroleum products—specifically, $250,000 in 2021.
The group’s parent company is the Cyprus-based offshore company Avestra Group Holding Ltd (Avestra), in which Roman Spiridonov, Dmitry Ivanov, the Ruric fund, Vadim Gurinov, and Igor Berezina own shares. Gurinov is one of Spiridonov’s long-standing partners in the Russian oil trade. After the war began, the Russian portion of Avestra’s business was registered to Berezina.
Dmitry Ivanov, a 64-year-old native of St. Petersburg, has no connection to Russia’s Avestra. However, according to leaked documents, he worked for Russian state-owned oil companies during the pandemic. At one of them, he was the head of the Large Projects Directorate.
Ivanov also did business for many years with Roman Spiridonov, who worked at Sibur in the early 2000s. Spiridonov and Ivanov shared several companies, including the St. Petersburg-based Hermitage, which traded petroleum products (liquidated in 2019), and Keri-Service LLC.
In total, Ivanov was the founder of about a dozen companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, all of which have now been liquidated or are in the process of liquidation.
Avestra’s oil and chemical trading business was doing well until a corporate conflict arose between Berezina, Spiridonov, and his business partners. As a result, Spiridonov sued Berezina for $1 million in old promissory notes he had received from a certain Nosyrev. In 2022, Berezina filed a petition in the Limassol court for the liquidation of the group’s Cypriot parent company, Avestra Group Holding Ltd. Naturally, his partners did not support this decision.
The proceedings dragged on and even reached a Russian court. Spiridonov and his colleagues sought an injunction against Berezin from continuing litigation outside of Russian jurisdiction, but were unsuccessful. However, Berezin achieved undoubted success, convincing a court in Cyprus to prohibit Spiridonov from pursuing litigation in Russian arbitration courts. In the summer of 2024, at his insistence, the court placed Avestra under external administration. It was discovered that funds were being siphoned off from the company through subsidiaries, suspicious loans were being provided, and there were indications of violations of EU sanctions by its entities.
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Ivanov and Spiridonov’s attempt to overturn the temporary administrator’s appointment through the Cyprus Supreme Court was rejected. Berezina then filed a lawsuit demanding that the group’s main companies disclose information about their activities and asked the court to award Spiridonov and the other shareholders damages for their poor performance. Avestra Group Holding Ltd is currently listed as an active company in the Cypriot registry.
Incidentally, this isn’t Spiridonov’s first attempt to use Russian courts to settle a dispute with an offshore business partner. In the late 2000s, he tried to freeze Samaraorgsintez shares through the Samara Arbitration Court during the proceedings in a British court, but the Russian court also rejected his request.