By Tassilo Hummel, Anton Zverev and Maria Tsvetkova
PARIS (Reuters) – Shortly after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, freight forwarder Hellmann Worldwide Logistics informed staff at its Moscow subsidiary that it was pulling out of Russia. Some employees at the German company saw this as an opportunity.
Before the war, Hellmann’s Moscow office had helped Russian industrial companies ship tools, parts, and equipment to Russia from the West. But after the invasion, these shipments were severely restricted by international sanctions. Instead, a Russian-registered company called Heinrich Tapp Rus (HT Rus), whose owners at the time included at least two former Hellmann employees, took over relations with many of Hellmann’s former customers.
HT Rus’s website offers its Russian customers “parallel imports,” a term widely used to describe shipping goods through third countries such as Turkey or the United Arab Emirates to circumvent Western sanctions. In its marketing materials, the company has adopted a corporate motto: “New reality – new opportunity.”
Using Russian tax documents for 2023 and 2024, as well as official company records in Russia and Germany, Reuters found that HT Rus provided services to Russian clients under international sanctions for supporting the Kremlin’s war machine.
The company, which reported revenue of about $17.5 million last year, has worked with Russian clients including: Aurus, the company that makes Vladimir Putin’s limousines; subsidiaries of Kamaz, a Russian military truck maker; and Tyumen Battery Factory, a battery supplier to a weapons manufacturer, Russian tax documents show.
Reuters was unable to determine whether HT Rus offered “parallel import” services to these companies, as tax documents did not reveal the nature of the services provided.
Kamaz said the information in the tax documents was either incorrect or they were unaware of it, but did not provide specific details. Aurus and Tyumen Battery Factory did not respond to requests for comment.
HT Rus is one of several intermediaries that offer their clients to circumvent Western sanctions and use shipments via third countries to supply industrial goods to Russia. This activity only constitutes a violation of sanctions if the goods are covered by sanctions or if the intermediary works with sanctioned entities. HT Rus stands out for the fact that very few cases have been made public in which European Union citizens have been caught doing business, either directly or through a wholly-owned subsidiary, with sanctioned entities, as shown by a Reuters analysis of sanctions violations.
HT Rus is owned by a company registered in Germany whose shareholder is a German businessman and which, until last month, had another German as director, company records show.
Under U.S. and European Union sanctions laws against Russia, any company that does business with a Russian company on an international blacklist is in violation of the sanctions. If a Western company has influenced an activity aimed at circumventing the sanctions, it could itself be sanctioned, making it difficult to do business, or face legal action.
Hellmann Worldwide Logistics said it had no connection to HT Rus’s operations or the people who run it. Reuters found no evidence that Hellmann violated the sanctions.
“In 2022, everything that was sanctioned goods… all that business was transferred to Heinrich Tapp,” said a former Hellmann executive in Russia, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter.
According to Russian company records as of June 28 this year, HT Rus is wholly owned by a German-registered company called HT East Management. A majority stake in HT East was purchased in June 2022 by Alexander Roedeler, a Düsseldorf-based businessman, according to the German company register.
Between 2017 and 2022, Roedeler worked in Germany for Hellmann’s Eastern Europe unit that dealt with Russia, according to a statement from Hellmann provided to Reuters.
Roedeler now works for the German investment group HTP Maximum, whose managing director is Patrick Nathe, according to the company’s website. Nathe is a former German manager at Hellmann who left the company in July 2022. Until March 2023, HT East Management and HTP Maximum had the same address in Düsseldorf registered in the German company register. According to its own website, HTP Maximum held a stake in a German company called Henrich Tapp GmbH between 2017 and 2021, which was the majority shareholder of HT East Management until German company registers showed in June 2022 that it had sold the stake.
Reuters found no other corporate or other relationship between HTP Maximum and HT East Management. Nathe told Reuters he was not involved in HT Rus or its parent company.
Vladimir Klaus, a German and Russian national who worked for Hellman in Moscow until it closed its offices, was a director of HT East Management until June 12 this year, when the German company’s records show he ceased to hold that position. Klaus did not respond to Reuters’ questions before or after he ceased to be a director.
Reuters found no evidence that HT Rus’ owner, HT East Management, did business directly with any sanctioned company.
HT Rus CEO Ruslan Shakirov said he deals directly with Roedeler as the current director of the German parent company. The parent company “is fully informed about the activities of the company (HT Rus), participates in them and gives instructions accordingly.”
Contacted by Reuters, Roedeler said: “I have no knowledge of the details of Heinrich Tapp Rus’ business activities and I have no influence on its operations.”
German customs, which oversees sanctions enforcement, said it could not comment on specific cases. Generally, it said that in certain circumstances a German company could be held legally liable for sanctions violations by its foreign subsidiary.
EU-based parent companies are prohibited from using their Russian subsidiaries to circumvent sanctions, for example by delegating decisions that run counter to sanctions or by having the Russian subsidiary approve such decisions, according to the European Commission’s guidance on sanctions against Russia.
CUSTOMERS SANCTIONED
Reuters was able to identify the Russian clients HT Rus worked with by examining documents the company filed with Russian tax authorities, where it must account for all its income and identify its source.
The documents relate to the second and fourth quarters of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. The documents do not disclose the services that HT Rus provided to its customers.
During those three periods, HT Rus provided services worth $172,324 to Aurus, a Russian state-owned company that makes the luxury sedan of the same name. Reuters was unable to determine the nature of those services.
Since 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been using the limousine instead of his usual Mercedes. This year, he even gave two of the cars to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The two leaders took turns driving each other in an Aurus limousine during Putin’s visit to North Korea last month.
In February, Aurus was placed on the US sanctions list, citing that its parent company is essential to Russia’s national defense and security. The designation means that any company doing business with the company is itself likely to be subject to US sanctions, which would lock the company out of the international banking system, discouraging partners from doing business with it for fear of being sanctioned themselves.
Seven of the transactions between Aurus and HT Rus, worth $3,773, took place after the sanctions were imposed, the documents show.
According to the documents, HT Rus provided services worth $290,725 to two subsidiaries and a joint venture of Kamaz, Russia’s largest truck maker. Again, Reuters was unable to establish the nature of these services.
All three entities manufacture or supply parts for Kamaz trucks. The U.S. government sanctioned the truckmaker in June 2022, noting that its vehicles were spotted carrying Russian troops and missiles during the invasion of Ukraine. Kamaz was added to an EU sanctions blacklist that same month.
Another HT Rus client, AO Proton, a maker of optical electronics equipment, was placed under U.S. sanctions in May 2023. It paid Heinrich Tapp $26,156 after the sanctions were imposed, the documents show. Reuters did not know what services HT Rus provided to AO Proton, which did not respond to a request for comment.
In December 2023, the governor of Russia’s Orel region, where Proton has a plant, awarded the company’s boss, Vyacheslav Menshov, a medal to recognize his “assistance in the special military operation” – the term used by Russian officials to describe the war in Ukraine.
Shakirov, HT Rus’s general director, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. Menshov, contacted through his company, did not respond to questions about the award.
According to the documents, HT Rus provided services worth $312,000 — Reuters could not determine the exact amount — to a company called Tyumen Battery Factory, including about $70,000 after the battery producer was placed under U.S. sanctions in December 2023. The company supplies batteries to at least one arms manufacturer, according to its website. Tyumen Battery Factory did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees U.S. sanctions, declined to comment.
Asked by Reuters about the company’s business dealings with sanctioned companies, Shakirov declined to comment because he said he could not recall all of the company’s customers.
“We have a lot of customers, we have a lot of suppliers, who ship through us,” he said.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel in Paris, Anton Zverev in London and Maria Tsvetkova in New York. With additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya and Christian Lowe in London and Mari Saito in Berlin; Editing by Daniel Flynn)
