Energy Daily

When Oil Smugglers Hide, Trackers Have to Get Clever

Shippers of sanctioned crude are adopting more sophisticated tactics to cover up their activities.

Oil tankers transferring a cargo of Russian oil off Greece.

Photographer: Laurent Laughlin/Bloomberg
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Welcome to our guide to the energy and commodities markets powering the global economy. Today, strategist Julian Lee looks at the difficulty of tracking sanctioned oil.

When my colleagues sought to write about the hidden switching of Iranian oil from one tanker to another off the coast of Malaysia, they quickly ran into a problem.