Oil trader Roman Spiridonov, in whose name the Dubai-based company Petroruss that trades Russian oil is registered, is a co-owner of the large international group Avestra.

One of his business partners reported in a Cypriot court that Avestra companies have been circumventing sanctions by trading Russian oil and chemicals.

The Avestra group includes the Russian LLC GC Avestra, the Swiss AVESTRA CHEMICAL (SUISSE) AG, the Dubai-based Avestra Chemical DMCC, Avestra Chemical Services Oy (Finland), the AVESTRA CHEMICAL representative office in Poland, as well as Avestra (Beijing) Chemical Commerce Trading Co., Ltd., which holds a stake in Manzhouli Far East Gas Co. Ltd. The latter manages a cross-border terminal in Manzhouli for receiving liquefied hydrocarbons — the only such terminal on the Russian-Chinese border. Avestra’s partner there is Heilongjiang Harbin Railway Foreign Economic and Trade Co. Ltd. (a 100% subsidiary of the Harbin Railway). Also part of the same group as Avestra are the Swedish fund Ruric, Mectra Chemical DMCC (UAE) and several Russian companies, including the Moscow-based LLC Khimservis.

The parent company of the group is the Cypriot offshore Avestra Group Holding Ltd (Avestra), shares in which are held by Roman Spiridonov, Dmitry Ivanov, the Ruric fund, Vadim Gurinov and Igor Berezin. Gurinov is one of Spiridonov’s long-standing partners in the trade of Russian oil. After the start of the war the Russian part of the Avestra business was registered in Berezin’s name.

Dmitry Ivanov, a 64-year-old native of St. Petersburg, has no connection to the Russian Avestra. However, according to leaks, during the pandemic he worked in Russian state oil companies. In one of them he headed the Directorate of Large Projects.

Ivanov also conducted business for many years with Roman Spiridonov, who worked at Sibur in the early 2000s. Spiridonov and Ivanov had several joint companies, including the St. Petersburg-based Hermitage, which traded petroleum products (liquidated in 2019), and LLC Keri-Service.

Overall, Ivanov was a founder of about a dozen companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg; at present all of them have been liquidated or are in the process of liquidation.

Avestra’s business of trading oil and chemical products went well until a corporate conflict arose between Berezin on one side and Spiridonov and his business partners on the other. As a result Spiridonov demanded through the court that Berezin pay one million dollars on old debt notes that he had received from a certain Nosyrev, while in 2022 Berezin filed an application with the Limassol court for the liquidation of the Cypriot parent company of the group, Avestra Group Holding Ltd. Naturally, his partners did not support this decision.

Berezin achieved undoubted successes, convincing the Cypriot court to prohibit Spiridonov from litigating in Russian arbitration courts, and in the summer of 2024, at his insistence, the court introduced external management into Avestra: it turned out that funds were being withdrawn from the company through subsidiaries, suspicious loans were being provided, and there were signs of violations of the EU sanctions regime by its structures. The attempt by Ivanov and Spiridonov to cancel the appointment of the temporary administrator through the Cypriot Supreme Court was rejected. Then Berezin through the court demanded that the main companies of the group disclose information about their activities and asked the court to recover damages from Spiridonov and the other shareholders for poor performance. At present Avestra Group Holding Ltd is listed in the Cypriot register as an active company.