The Russian oil giant Rosneft, through affiliated intermediaries, provided more than $2 billion in funding to the crypto company A7, led by fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor. According to a journalistic investigation by The Financial Times, the money was used to finance Russian imports, including war-related needs, by circumventing international sanctions imposed on Moscow, IPN reports.
The investigation is based on a leak of internal documents from company A7, mainly from the end of 2024 to August 2025. According to these, A7 created, with falsified documents, front companies through which it made international payments via the SWIFT system, on behalf of Russian buyers. Exporters, including traders linked to Rosneft, transferred their earnings in Emirati dirhams to the accounts of these companies, and in exchange received rubles in Russia, mainly through Promsviazbank, the state bank that serves the state defense order and finances enterprises in the defense industry.
A large part of the currency came from a group of 16 companies related to Rosneft, called the “Coral network”, after Coral Energy, a sanctioned trader now operating under the name 2Rivers. In June 2025, two-thirds of the currency procured by A7 came from these companies. Each of the 138 dirham transfers to the front companies was accompanied by a ruble payment to Hurus Trade, one of the network companies. The falsified invoices for Hurus indicated an Algerian port as the delivery point, and the goods were listed as products such as fuel oil or cereals.
According to the documents, Ilan Shor personally met with representatives of Coral, who, according to him, made settlements in the Tether cryptocurrency, tied to the dollar. The documents also mention a company from Dubai, internally named “the trader for Sibur”, from which A7 received at least 22 million dollars in dirhams. 2Rivers denies any connection with the “Coral network” and says it ceased its activity after sanctions were imposed on it in December 2024, that it has not deposited or received funds through the described mechanisms, that it has not settled transactions in cryptocurrencies, and that it has not met or corresponded with Ilan Shor.
A7, along with its affiliated companies A71 and A7-AGENT, is on the international sanctions lists of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Previously, IPN reported on how these entities help Russia circumvent Western sanctions by concealing actual cash flows to facilitate Moscow’s financial transfers.
