By Tassilo Hummel, Anton Zverev and Maria Tsvetkova
PARIS (Reuters) – Shortly after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, freight forwarder Hellmann Worldwide Logistics informed staff at its Moscow branch that it was pulling out of Russia, prompting some who had worked for the German company to see an opportunity.
Before the war, Hellmann's Moscow office had helped Russian industrial companies ship tools, parts, and equipment from the West to Russia, but after the invasion, such 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 the relationship with many of Hellmann's old clients.
HT Rus' website offers customers in Russia “parallel import,” a term widely used to describe shipping goods through third countries such as Turkey or the United Arab Emirates to circumvent Western sanctions. In marketing materials, the company adopted a corporate motto: “New reality – new opportunity.”
Based on Russian tax documents for 2023 and 2024 and official business registers in Russia and Germany, Reuters found that HT Rus provided services to Russian clients under international sanctions for their support of 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 maker of Russian military trucks; and Tyumen Battery Factory, a supplier of batteries for an arms manufacturer, Russian tax documents show.
Reuters could not determine whether HT Rus offered “parallel import” services to these companies, as the tax documents did not disclose the nature of the services provided.
Kamaz said the information in the tax documents was either wrong or it had no knowledge 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 help clients circumvent Western sanctions and use shipments via third countries to deliver industrial goods to Russia. That activity only constitutes a sanctions violation if the goods are subject to sanctions, or if the intermediary cooperates with sanctioned entities. HT Rus stands out because there have been few publicly reported cases of European Union citizens doing business, directly or through a wholly owned subsidiary, with sanctioned entities, a Reuters analysis of sanctions violations found.
HT Rus is owned by a company registered in Germany with a German businessman as a shareholder and, according to company records, until last month also a German as a director.
Under US and EU laws governing sanctions against Russia, any company that does business with a Russian company on an international blacklist is in violation of sanctions. If a Western company can be shown to have had influence on the sanctions-evading activities, it could be subject to sanctions itself – making it difficult to do business – or prosecution.
Hellmann Worldwide Logistics said it had nothing to do with the activities of HT Rus or the people who run it. Reuters found no evidence that Hellmann violated sanctions.
“In 2022, everything that fell under the sanctions was transferred to Heinrich Tapp,” said a former Hellmann executive in Russia, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
HT Rus is wholly owned by a German-registered company called HT East Management, according to Russian corporate data as of June 28 this year. A majority stake in HT East was purchased in June 2022 by Alexander Roedeler, a businessman based in Düsseldorf, according to the German commercial register.
According to a statement from Hellmann to Reuters, Roedeler worked in Germany for Hellmann's Eastern European department dealing with Russia between 2017 and 2022.
Roedeler now works for German investment group HTP Maximum, of which Patrick Nathe is a director, according to the company’s website. Nathe is a former German Hellmann executive who left the company in July 2022. Until March 2023, HT East Management and HTP Maximum had the same address in Düsseldorf, listed in the German commercial 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 HT East Management’s majority shareholder until German corporate records showed the company sold the stake in June 2022.
Reuters found no other business or other relationship between HTP Maximum and HT East Management. Nathe told Reuters he had no involvement with HT Rus or its parent company.
German-Russian dual national Vladimir Klaus, who worked for Hellman in Moscow until it closed its offices there, was a director of HT East Management until June 12 this year, when German company records show he was no longer in that role. Klaus did not respond to questions from Reuters before or after he stepped down as director.
Reuters found no evidence that HT Rus' owner, HT East Management, did business directly with any sanctioned company.
HT Rus's director, Ruslan Shakirov, said he dealt directly with Roedeler as the current director of the German parent company. The parent company “is fully aware of the company's (HT Rus's) activities, participates in them and gives corresponding instructions.”
Speaking to Reuters, Roedeler said: “I have no knowledge of the details of Heinrich Tapp Rus' business activities and I have no influence on the business operations.”
German customs, which oversees enforcement of sanctions, said it could not comment on specific cases. In general, it said that in some circumstances a German company could be held legally liable for sanctions violations by its foreign subsidiary.
Under the European Commission's guidelines on sanctions against Russia, EU-based parent companies are prohibited from using their Russian subsidiaries to circumvent sanctions, for example by delegating decisions to them that violate the sanctions or by approving such decisions by the Russian subsidiary.
CERTIFIED CLIENTS
Reuters was able to determine which Russian clients HT Rus worked with by reviewing documents the company filed with Russian tax authorities, in which they are required to account for all their income and identify its source.
The documents cover the second and fourth quarters of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. The documents do not specify what services HT Rus provided to its clients.
During those three periods, HT Rus provided $172,324 in services to Aurus, a Russian state-owned company that produces the eponymous luxury sedan. Reuters was unable to determine what those services were.
Since 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun using the limousine instead of his usual Mercedes, and this year he gave two of the cars to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The two leaders took turns riding in an Aurus limousine when Putin visited North Korea last month.
Aurus was placed on a U.S. sanctions list in February on the grounds that its parent company is essential to Russia’s national defense and security. The sanctions designation means that any company doing business with the company could itself be placed under U.S. sanctions, which would exclude the company from the international banking system, discouraging partners from doing business with the company for fear of being sanctioned themselves.
The documents show that seven of the transactions between Aurus and HT Rus, worth $3,773, occurred after the date the sanctions were imposed.
HT Rus provided services worth $290,725 to two subsidiaries and one joint venture of Kamaz, Russia's largest truck maker, according to the documents. Again, Reuters could not determine what those services were.
The three entities all produce or supply Kamaz truck parts. The U.S. government imposed sanctions on the truck maker in June 2022, noting that its vehicles had been spotted carrying Russian soldiers and missiles during the invasion of Ukraine. Kamaz was added to an EU sanctions blacklist the same month.
Another of HT Rus’ customers, 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 Oryol region, where Proton has a factory, presented the company's boss, Vyacheslav Menshov, with a medal in recognition of his “assistance in the Special Military Operation” — the term Russian officials use to describe the war in Ukraine.
Shakirov, the general director of HT Rus, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. Menshov, reached through his company, did not respond to questions about the award.
HT Rus provided $312,000 worth of services — Reuters could not determine what they were — to a company called Tyumen Battery Factory, according to the documents, about $70,000 of which came after the battery maker was placed under U.S. sanctions in December 2023. The company supplies batteries to at least one weapons maker, according to its website. Tyumen Battery Factory did not respond to a request for comment.
The US Treasury Department, which oversees US sanctions, declined to comment.
When asked by Reuters whether the company did business with sanctioned firms, Shakirov declined to comment, saying he could not remember all of the company's clients.
“We have a lot of customers and suppliers who supply through us,” he said.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel in Paris, Anton Zverev in London and Maria Tsvetkova in New York. Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya and Christian Lowe in London and Mari Saito in Berlin; Editing by Daniel Flynn)
