For weeks, the story of the Caroline Bezengi has been about who wasn't showing up. The owner wouldn't answer the phone. The flag registry had already disowned the ship. And, as we reported on August 11, no insurer of record was funding a cleanup. That's changed, at least partly. Exclusive reporting from Lloyds List says a sanctioned Russian insurer, AlfaStrakhovanie, is understood to be funding the response to the stricken Suezmax, but only after sanctions waivers were obtained to let salvors engage with a designated entity's money.
The ship itself hasn't gotten any easier to manage. Lloyd's List reports that seven of the tanker's 12 cargo tanks are now leaking, and that the stateless vessel risks breaking apart in 40-knot winds and four-metre swells tied to Oman's Khareef monsoon. We haven't independently verified the tank-by-tank count or the wind and swell figures beyond Lloyd's List's reporting, so treat those specific numbers as attributed to that outlet for now, pending confirmation from Omani authorities or the salvors themselves.
AlfaStrakhovanie is one of Russia's largest composite insurers and part of the Alfa Group consortium. The EU sanctioned the company in December 2023 over its role insuring vessels moving Russian crude, which the bloc says amounts to irregular and high-risk shipping practices under International Maritime Organization resolution A.1192(33). The UK added the insurer to its own list in November 2024, and the EU's General Court rejected AlfaStrakhovanie's bid to overturn the designation in a February 2026 ruling.
That history is why the insurer's reported role here is complicated rather than simply good news. Transacting with a sanctioned entity, including receiving or routing funds from one, is generally barred without a specific license, even when the money is going toward something as uncontroversial as an oil-spill response. Lloyd's List has reported that a waiver was needed before salvors could touch money traceable to AlfaStrakhovanie. Regulators such as the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation do grant licenses for humanitarian and environmental purposes in other cases, but we haven't been able to confirm which regulator issued this particular waiver or how broad it is.
Reuters has reported that risk consultancy Ambrey has contracted an international oil-spill response firm and deployed vessels, aircraft and roughly 100 tons of equipment. Put together with the AlfaStrakhovanie detail, it answers a question that's been hanging over this incident since the grounding: if the ship had no real Protection & Indemnity cover, who was actually going to pay for any of this? The answer, it appears, is a sanctioned Russian insurer working through a legal exception built for exactly this kind of situation.
Estimates of the spill's size have shifted all summer, which says something on its own about how little of this is being independently verified on the ground. Reuters' latest figure, carried by puts the slick above 2,000 square kilometers, threatening about 40 kilometers of Omani coastline near Ras Madrakah and potentially Masirah Island. That's well above the roughly 390 square kilometers reported earlier this month, and it doesn't line up neatly with earlier estimates from Greenpeace Germany (around 600 square kilometers) or the Dutch watchdog PAX (as high as 800 square kilometers), which didn't agree with each other either. Some of that spread comes down to different satellite passes and analysis methods, and some of it comes down to how fast a sheen changes with weather. Whatever the exact number, it's moving in one direction, and Oman's Environment Authority confirmed this week that oil has now reached the mainland coast, not just open water.
The vessel is following the same trend. An Omani maritime survey in mid-July already found the Caroline Bezengi sitting lower with a worsening list, and press reported that only one of its cargo tanks was confirmed intact at that point, with the rest showing seawater contamination. Ambrey's own statement this week called the operation "extremely challenging" given the monsoon's fog, rain and swells, language that lines up with, though doesn't confirm, the more specific wind and wave figures.
One more thing worth flagging on the timeline: the crew first reported a suspected explosion on June 8 off Yemen, but this week's wire reports describe the vessel as having run aground on June 30, while earlier maritime-trade accounts put the grounding closer to three days after the blast. We haven't been able to reconcile that gap from public reporting, so any single grounding date circulating right now should be read with some caution.
The problem Insurance Business flagged in its earlier coverage hasn't gone away just because a funder has turned up. Western P&I clubs under the International Group, which together cover most of the world's ocean-going tonnage and can call on pooled reinsurance up to roughly $1 billion per pollution incident, have mostly exited Russian-linked tonnage since 2022, a shift we covered as it unfolded. What's filled that space is largely what's showing up in Oman now: domestic Russian insurers and state-linked reinsurance vehicles operating outside the P&I pool, with capital and claims-paying ability that outsiders can't easily check. A separate Insurance Business report on another detained shadow-fleet vessel made much the same point earlier this year: paperwork that looks like cover isn't the same as capital that can actually pay a nine-figure claim once a vessel sits outside the mainstream P&I system.
Research from the Kyiv School of Economics Institute, widely cited in maritime trade press, has found that insurance data is missing for more than a third of the global tanker fleet, and that vessels carrying Russian crude are far less likely than the rest of the fleet to carry verifiable International Group cover. AlfaStrakhovanie and fellow sanctioned insurer Ingosstrakh both come up repeatedly in that research as writing cover for shadow-fleet tonnage without disclosing terms. A Nordic-Baltic proposal for mandatory insurance checks at maritime chokepoints has been floated, but it isn't in force anywhere that would have applied to this ship's route.
For underwriters and reinsurers carrying tanker war-risk, pollution-liability or charterers'-liability exposure, this incident is close to a live test of what broking firm Miller warned about in analysis picked up by Insurance Business's Asia and UK titles: rising ship-to-ship transfers and deliberately murky ownership eventually running into a casualty nobody wants to own. S&P Global estimates shadow-fleet tonnage at roughly 17% of the global oil tanker fleet, with some trackers putting it closer to one in five vessels, which means renewal conversations on tanker risk increasingly need to check whether claimed P&I cover actually shows up on the International Group's member list, and what the plan is if it doesn't.
None of that resolves what's happening right now off the Hallaniyat Islands: whether a salvage job funded through a sanctions waiver, in monsoon weather, on a tanker already reportedly leaking from more than half its cargo tanks, can get ahead of the spill before the hull gives out. Oman's marine reserve, home to one of the smallest and most endangered humpback whale populations on Earth, is the one bearing the cost while that gets figured out.
This story updates Insurance Business America's August 11 coverage of the Caroline Bezengi incident with new reporting from Lloyd's List and Reuters.
