A veteran Seychelles-owned VLCC is said to have loaded two Russian oil cargoes from shadow fleet suezmaxes as ship transfers resumed off the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.

After more than a year of inactivity at the lightering zone off the African coast, oil analytics company Kpler tracked two Russian ship-to-ship transfer operations involving the 301,000-dwt Atila (built 2003).

The Cameroon-flagged tanker took 1m barrels of Urals crude from each of the 159,000-dwt Sakarya (built 2011) and 158,000-dwt Cankiri (built 2008), controlled by Hong Kong’s Prominent Shipmanagement.