At a downtown office block in Mumbai, packing tape peels off a black door whose handle appears to have been ripped out. A pile of post is strewn on the floor outside. A guy from a neighboring office says the staff moved out a few weeks ago, destination unknown.
Almost 1,200 miles away in Dubai, a small office in a run down industrial estate, offers no clues that it, too, is a small cog in Russia’s vast new petroleum supply chain.
The two locations are listed on an international maritime database as belonging to firms running $2 billion in tanker assets between them. They assembled fleets in under a year that are now delivering millions of barrels of Russian oil across the globe.
