EXCLUSIVE: The Sanctions Delisting They Hoped We’d Miss

The ships were dark, the data was falsified, and Treasury called it routine. That alone would be a story. It is not the story.

This morning, the U.S. Treasury published a routine sanctions delisting notice. PHANTOM WAKE flagged the vessel. I did the rest.

I spent the last eight hours confirming and re-confirming what I found. I needed to be sure before writing that a foreign head of government is implicated in a consequential decision made today by Treasury — and that the public record establishing that connection has been sitting there, openly, for sixteen years.