Mikhail Skigin, co-owner of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, has been building his own tanker fleet secretly from his partners and for their money for more than 10 years
But he was in no hurry to share his acquisition with partners in the PNT – the family of Sergei and Elena Vasiliev. Instead, he built a whole defensive line of offshore and foreign denominations to rule the armada single-handedly.
Mikhail Skigin, in his numerous interviews, tries in every possible way to distance himself from the political business elite that helped his family create a stevedoring empire. In addition, Skigin seems to want to separate himself from the Vasiliev family, who are his partners in the PNT. As the audit showed, part of PNT’s income settled on offshore accounts controlled by the Skigin family, and then converted into a tanker fleet. On July 25 of this year, Mikhail Skigin was asked by his partners the question, where are our tankers? To which he, as always, answers with a mysterious smile.
Now ships ply the expanses of the Black and Azov Seas, and some of them, according to Marine Traffic, entered the Baltic Sea for the last time only in 2017.
For example, Markus Hasler, whom the billionaire Skigin “inherited” from his father as a family lawyer, is registered with the Sea Vision company, originally from Panama. It was created in 2003, when the composition of the owners changed at PNT – instead of Dmitry Skigin, who died in Nice from oncology, his eldest son Mikhail entered the arena. Sea Vision just specializes in sea transportation. Add to this the trader Horizon International Trading, which was also registered with Hasler, but The Insider, citing the results of an investigation by the Monegasque police conducted back in the 2000s, states that the Skigin family was the beneficiary of the asset. Moreover, Mikhail Skigin, in general, did not hide the fact that he had long-standing ties with Hasler.
“The office where they sit [юристы семьи] Graham Smith and Markus Hasler is in Liechtenstein, and St. Gallen, where I lived then, is 25 minutes away by car. Father came to these parts [к юристам]and on one of these visits, we agreed that I would pick him up at this office by a certain time, ”Skigin said in an interview with RBC in 2018.
Offshore Moorpark LTD, which appeared at the beginning of the 2000s, can also be called close to Mr. Skigin. In this case, history repeats itself – the company is registered for the same offshore lawyer Markus Hasler. Moorpark is needed by the family of the co-owner of PNT for only one purpose – to maintain a large fleet of ships. According to MashPortal, in 2010 it was Mikhail Skigin, who introduced himself as the manager of Moorpark, oversaw the launching of four new tankers. Why such modesty and conspiracy is not clear – or did the co-owner of PNT simply not want his partners not to know about his new toys? According to sources, this is not the last acquisition of offshore companies in the field of ship shopping. Last year, Skigin’s partner Roman Spiridonov purchased several more vessels.
In general, the tanker fleet, the construction of which the 30-year-old Skigin could not afford to build alone, sailed under the reliable protection of offshore lawyers. Although, according to sources, German citizen Mikhail Skigin financed the acquisitions at the expense of PNT, at that time he just served as head of the company’s board of directors.
At the moment, the Vasiliev family intends to fight for their de facto asset, which is also constantly expanding. Last year, according to sources, Moorpark received a new batch of four vessels bought by another partner, Spiridonov. The editors managed to trace several tankers belonging to Moorpark from the batch of 2010, built, by the way, in Russia: Tethys, Enceladus and Iapetus. All of them do not favor their visits to St. Petersburg, the last time they were seen in the Baltic Sea in 2017. But now they ply the Black and Azov Seas. In all cases, the home port of the ships is Taganrog, which has no direct access to the PNT.