In the aggressor-controlled”Sevastopol media”, a story surfaced about the death of nineteen-year-old Ivan Litvinov on January 24 on board the large fishing vessel “Avunda Reeefer” under the flag of Panama, a “graduate of the maritime college” of the fake “Sevastopol State University”, and, among other things, a player for the American football team “Sevastopol Titans”.
Some of the publicity of this situation was due to the fact that the parents blame the crew officers for the death of their son, and they cannot receive for burial the body, allegedly “stuck” on board a ship located near Japan, which is then engaged in tuna fishing, or “lost” in the port morgue of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.
Naturally, the aggressor’s intelligence services do not miss the opportunity to imitate “international cooperation” in the form of “dance on the Litvinov’s bones,” but the story itself is interesting in a completely different way: situation was researched by Borys Babin and Olesya Tsibulko.
According to the parents of the deceased sailor, Litvinov, who worked in the engine room, wanted to leave the voyage early in January, for which the captain allegedly wanted a “penalty” of 400 thousand rubles.
Ten days after the report on the write-off, a two-hundred-weight steel sheet allegedly “fell on Litvinov,” crushing his head.
In this detective story, we note that as the information dumps of the occupiers “simply” write, the crew of the “Avunda Reeefer” are “95 % Sevastopol and Crimean residents”, and they were recruited by a certain crewing company “Morskoy Menedgment” (“Maritime Management”), and the vessel is allegedly “under the technical management of Yustar Groop Ltd, a Malta-registered company”.
A simple check shows that the crew of the “Avunda Reeefer”, number IMO 9072824, actually included several Crimean residents, both according to Ukrainian and Russian documents.
But this vessel, built in 1994 in Japan, supervised by the Japanese register “Nippon Kaiji Kyokai” and entered into the database of the North Atlantic Fisheries Commission, changed its two names “Marine Phoenix” and “Amber Lily”, as well as the flag from the Liberian one, has, in addition to the supposedly “Maltese ship owner” “Yustat Group Ltd”, to which we will return later, and the owner – a certain company “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A”.
And this structure, or rather structures, allows us to “open the door wide” into the rich life of the international fishing mafia associated with the occupiers. Firstly, one “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A” is registered in the capital of Panama as a classic “laying company”, but its contacts, email and phone number completely coincide with the data of the large Greek company “Laskaridis Maritime S.A.”, which in turn is a shipping company “industry” of the Greek corporation “Alimia Group”.
Previously “Laskaridis Maritime S.A.” surfaced in a story related to the seizure on November 27, 2016 by Nigerian sea pirates of the “Saronic Breeze” refrigerator under the Panamanian flag, with an alleged “crew of Russians and Ukrainians.”
However, the “Russians” there were most likely the same as the “American football player” Litvinov, since the crew was recruited by the “Taentr Podhotovki Moryakov” (“Sailors Training Center”) structure, as a “Ukrainian-Greek crewing company” registered in Sevastopol at 5 Rybakov Street at Kamyshovaya Bay.
And so, by “an amazing coincidence of circumstances”, at the same address before the occupation there was a “Sevastopol branch of the representative office of the company “Fishing Company S.A.””.
Let us recall that this structure was an offshore company, to which the vessels of the State Fisheries Agency of Ukraine were registered, including the vessel “Ivan Golubets”, about the activities of which our Association conducted a number of investigations.
As the State Fisheries Agency itself wrote in 2022, “based on the results of internal and international audits … revealed financial irregularities in the activities of Fishing Company S.A. As a result, on August 29, 2022, Mikhail German was dismissed from his position and a new director was appointed”.
This “Greek trace” allows us to connect our investigations into fish canning activities in both the occupied and non-occupied territories of Ukraine, including the ill-fated “Aquamarine”, and apparently it is now clear where, in fact, the tuna came from in its cans.
However, “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A” has other clones, and we are not only talking about companies of the same name in Singapore and Rotterdam. The most interesting thing here is the connection between this structure on marine resources and the address at 33/8 Kuibysheva Street in St. Petersburg, where “Yugreftransflot” JSC is registered.
This aggressor’s structure is not just engaged in the exploitation of the World Ocean in its interests. Among other things, as Viktor Kot, a member of the company’s board of directors, stated in 2022, “the multi-purpose arctic dual-purpose transport refrigerator of the “Ivan Papanin” type,” being developed by “Yugreftransflot”, “can be equipped with the Caliber-K container missile system”.
As “project manager,” Kot indicated that “this will require three standard cargo containers that can be loaded on board and unloaded ashore by 40-tonne ship cranes”.
“Curator” Kot stated that he “will be able to service the infrastructure of the Northern Sea Route, scientific and military bases in the Arctic without icebreaker support”, obviously within the framework of global warming as one of the strategic criminal goals of Russian aggression.
It is noteworthy that at the same time, “Yugreftransflot” does not hesitate to call itself a member of “Alpha Reefer Transport GmbH” from Hamburg, as well as a member of BIMCO. But the most interesting thing here is something else.
Before the occupation of Crimea, “Yugreftransflot” itself was registered as a Ukrainian enterprise, the successor of the state structures “Yugrybkholodflot” and “Yugreftransflot”, which arose as the successors of the Sevastopol Production Directorate of Transport and Refrigerated Fleet; as you might guess, “Yugreftransflot” was registered at 5 Rybakov Street, Sevastopol.
The connections between the St. Petersburg-based “Yugreftransflot”, Sevastopol and “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A.” are quite obvious. For example, a certain captain Sergei Strekach, a graduate of the Sevastopol First Ukrainian Maritime Institute, published work in his resume first on the vessels of “Yugreftransflot”, until 2016, and then on the vessels of “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A.”
Moreover, the email address of “Yugreftransflot” in Russian registers coincides with the contacts of the St. Petersburg company “Marine Management” at Bolshaya Posadskaya, 12, and apparently it was this crewing that arranged the future corpse of Ivan Litvinov to work in the engine room of “Avunda Reeefer”.
However, this is not all. The founders of the St. Petersburg crewing company “Maritime Management” are Refat Bariev and Vladimir Andreev, while Andreev’s “full namesake” is still the director of the Ukrainian public joint-stock company “Yugreftransflot”.
Before the occupation, this structure managed to “distinguish itself” by selling a crane to the Sevastopol fishing port and leasing land for a “ferry crossing” from the city council, and naturally it was also registered on Sevastopol Rybakov Street.
Also, Refat Bariev and the current head of St. Petersburg “Yugreftransflot” Dmitry Kiselev in 2002 registered “Mys Priboyny” LLC in Sevastopol in the same house on Rybakov Street.
Well, then both the St. Petersburg “Yugreftransflot” and the “Mys Priboyny”, “cloned” by the occupiers, became the “founders” of the Sevastopol structure “Port Lebyazhy LTD”, also “cloned” by the occupiers from the corresponding Ukrainian company.
Among other things, this “port” is designated by the occupiers as a separate illegal element of the “marine checkpoint” with a “cargo and passenger terminal” and a “ship repair facility” at berths 235-237, as well as on the western shore of Kamyshova Bay.
And now, when it is finally clear that those involved in the murder of Ivan Litvinov should be looked for not in exotic Rabaul, but in the Sevastopol Reeds, let us return to the “Maltese shipowner” mentioned by Sevastopol propaganda, clearly with a hint of “evil Europe”, and “purely by accident” with a double “typo” in the title.
Here everything is also quite obvious: “Yustat Group Ltd” appeared in Malta in 2014 and it operates a fleet with such “classic Maltese names” as “Alma”, “Salgir”, “Belbek”, “Angara” and that same “Avunda Reefer”. It is gratifying that the organizers of this scam with the “European relocation” of “Yugreftransflot” vessels know so much about the Crimean rivers, and about the Angara, a tributary of the Salgir, and even about the modest Gurzuf river Avunda.
We weren’t the only ones who noticed this; two years ago, “Africa Port & Ships” wrote about the same Alma, IMO number 9140968, that “Yustat Group is associated with Yugreftransflot, the former declared owner of Alma, whose main office was in the Crimean Sevastopol, Ukraine.”
In this story, it is worth special mentioning that in the recent decision of the European Commission 2024/411, the same “Yustat Group Ltd” under the number IMO 6254341 is declared not as a Maltese, but as a Greek shipowner, and on its website this “Sevastopol exile” indicates an address on the street Tsimiski in Thessalonica.
There are quite a lot of Greek traces in this history, including the former owner of “Avunda Reefer”, “Roswell Navigation Corp”, which will certainly be the subject of additional research.
