📰 Syria’s Hidden Fleet: How Assad’s Regime Sold State Ships for One Dollar

In early January, under a pale winter sun over the Black Sea, satellites spotted a red-hulled cargo ship moored near a grain silo in Russian-occupied Crimea. The vessel was one of three syrian cargo ships—Phoenicia, Laodicea, and syria—accused by Ukrainian authorities of transporting stolen grain from occupied territory. What made them remarkable was not only their role in Russia’s “shadow fleet,” but the fact that they once belonged to the Syrian state. In 2023, while Bashar al-Assad was still in power, these ships were quietly transferred to an offshore company in the Seychelles for the symbolic price of one dollar each.

Selling a Nation’s Fleet as per contracts and corporate records obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its Syrian partner Siraj, Syria’s living heritage">Syria’s General Maritime Transport Company sold the vessels to Al-Huda Holding Ltd, a shell company registered in the Seychelles. The firm disclosed no public ownership and operated through opaque corporate secrecy rules. Sanctions expert Vittorio Marisca di Siracapriola called the sale “a textbook example of state capture. ” He stated that disposing of multi-million-dollar assets for one dollar each showed “how regime-connected actors stripped public wealth from Syria’s books while keeping control in their own hands. ” Each ship had been part of the national fleet for over a decade. Phoenicia, built in Japan in 2009, could carry 19,000 tons; Syria and Laodicea, both built in China in the mid-2000s, each carried 13,000 tons.

Shell Companies and Sanctions Evasion Al-Huda’s director, Ali Mohammad Deeb, was little known to the public. But leaked corporate documents show his deep ties to businesses close to Assad’s inner circle. Deeb held shares in at least eight Syrian firms between 2021 and 2024, three of whose partners have been sanctioned by the European Union for helping the regime evade sanctions. One of those partners, Ali Najib Ibrahim, ran what EU investigators described as “multiple front companies” for the Assad regime.

In fact, another, Ahmad Khalil Khalil, co-owned Sanad security Services, a firm that guarded Russian energy interests in Syria under Wagner Group supervision. Deeb also chaired Iloma Investment, a private company that took control of ticketing revenues for state-owned Syrian Air in 2024—an arrangement a former airline director described as “a front for the leader. ” The Captagon Connection Soon after the ships were sold, their management shifted to firms linked to Tahir Kayali, a Syrian businessman sanctioned by the United States, Britain, and…