An EU court judgment that lays out an import scheme in unusual detail, because the defendants agreed the facts. It is in Estonian and the translations here are this site’s. The judgment anonymises everyone except the two defendants, so this page names only them.
What the court found
Keystone Shipping OÜ, a Tallinn company, bought bitumen made in Russia, at least in 2023, from four Russian companies. The court records that the arrangement was meant to move Russian bitumen into Europe and other countries, and that Andrey Kolesnikov, the company’s only board member from 2017 until January 2025, set it up with a deputy and a legal adviser.
The volumes in the judgment are large. Between June and October 2023 the company bought about 52 million kilograms from one Russian company alone, exported from Russia in the same period and imported into Latvia, Germany, Peru, Mexico and Panama. From another Russian supplier, a subsidiary of Gazprom Neft, it bought about 11 million kilograms, shipped to South Africa, Uruguay and Peru.
The sham chains
To hide that the seller was a Russian company and the buyer was Keystone, the court says a “chain of sham transactions” was built in which the bitumen appeared to pass between foreign companies.
- In one chain, a Russian company appeared to sell to a Georgian company, which appeared to sell to a Hong Kong company, which appeared to sell to Keystone.
- In another, goods appeared to pass from the Georgian company to the Hong Kong company, to a Kazakh company, and on to a German one.
The judgment says the contracts in the names of the foreign companies were signed by a Keystone employee, who “added the electronic signature of the relevant company’s manager and the company’s stamp” to each.
The customs papers
On 29 December 2023 the ship M/S Valday arrived at Muuga port from St Petersburg carrying bitumen. The entry declaration filed that day named Keystone as consignee and Uzbek and Kazakh companies as consignors. The court found that employees of a Russian supplier gave the customs declarant, who passed them to the Estonian Tax and Customs Board, falsified Kazakh and Uzbek export declarations, origin certificates and invoices. It also found that a made-up reply letter, apparently from the Kazakh company, was drafted to explain why a Kazakh export declaration had become invalid, so as to hide that the bitumen came from Russia. The legal adviser, whose role was to monitor sanctions, took part in preparing it, the judgment says.
The rules broken
The court applied two provisions of Council Regulation 833/2014:
- Article 3i, which since 26 February 2023 has banned buying, importing or transferring listed goods originating in or exported from Russia. The judgment notes that bitumen products under customs headings 2713 and 2715 were among them, with a wind-down for contracts signed earlier that ended on 27 May 2023.
- Article 5aa(1)(b), which bans transactions with an entity outside the EU that is more than 50 per cent owned by a listed one. The court found that one supplier was more than 97 per cent owned by Gazprom Neft, which is on that annex. This is the EU form of the ownership test explained on the 50 percent rule page.
The outcome
Under a plea agreement, on 21 January 2026 the Harju County Court fined the company €250,000 and Kolesnikov €32,110 after crediting a day in detention. It confiscated €179,200 held from the sale of bitumen and ordered the company to pay about €61,900 in costs, most of it storing and testing the seized bitumen.
What the record shows
- The documents and the ship disagreed. The entry declaration named Uzbek and Kazakh consignors, and the vessel had sailed from St Petersburg.
- The person tasked with monitoring sanctions was part of it. The judgment describes the legal adviser’s job as watching the sanctions and says he also coordinated the chain with the Russian side.
- The ownership test reached a supplier. The finding on the Gazprom Neft subsidiary rests on ownership, not on the subsidiary’s own name appearing on a list.
See also third-country transshipment, cargo origin blending and front companies, and for the same jurisdictions in trade statistics, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Hong Kong.