Shillong, May 10: Trinamool Congress (TMC) has alleged that two Gujarat based companies sold Russian oil imports to the European Union at inflated prices, making huge profits.
Jawahar Sircar, a Rajya Sabha member for TMC, has requested explanation on this in a letter to foreign minister S Jaishankar. He also mentions rumours about Gatik Ship Management, an unidentified organisation that is shipping all of the Russian oil on its own, in the letter.
Sircar referenced two news articles in his letter to support his claims that a mystery Mumbai-based firm called “Gatik Ship Management” unexpectedly purchased 54 oil tankers in the previous year in order to profit from Russian oil.
In reference to the report, he claimed that it had transported more than 50% of the 83 million barrels of “crude oil and oil products” that had been imported into Indian ports. However, there isn’t much information available about Gatik Ship Management, not even on the website of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
Sircar has also brought up a paper from Finland’s CREA thinktank, which claims that despite several nations forbidding the purchase of Russian oil, oil from Russia is still being imported indirectly through five nations, including India.
The term “laundromat” was introduced by CREA to describe the five countries that European nations purchase a significant amount of their oil from. These include China, Turkey, the UAE, and Singapore in addition to India.
The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, used to be India’s primary source of crude oil imports. But since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, everything has changed drastically.
Before the Ukraine War, Russia was a little exporter of oil to India. Prior to March 2022, India imported only 1% of its crude oil from Russia; this percentage has now increased to 34% in just one year.