Accountability for Damen research in Russia

This article was last updated on December 6, 2024

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Accountability for Damen research in Russia

Nieuwsuur’s investigative editors investigated the deliveries of thousands of parts to Russia for a shipbuilding project designed by Damen Shipyards. In this article you can read how we conducted our research. Below are the full responses from a number of companies we spoke to.

For this research, we spoke to various experts, companies, civil servants and lawyers at home and abroad. We asked questions to customs, the Functional Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A number of sources wished to remain anonymous.

We obtained information about people from public sources, such as profiles on social media. We also searched non-public sources such as company registers at home and abroad, including the Chamber of Commerce. We were allowed to use the complete databases with trade data from Importgenius and Sayari for this research.

Customs dates

Central to this research are databases with Russian customs data to which we gained access through the American companies Importgenius and Sayari. Importgenius collects and sells trade data, mainly to companies. Sayari is a company that also collects this data and uses it to analyze trade flows, sanctions avoidance and tax evasion.

Companies and governments use the companies’ services. Studies based on data from Importgenius and Sayari have previously appeared in leading media including The New York Times, Financial Times, Reuters and NRC.

We were given access to complete import data from Russia, among others, for the period of our research. This allowed us to see what Russia imported before and after the invasion of Ukraine. We have the data up to and including the beginning of 2024.

There is a reason why Russia makes this import data public, says Importgenius. The company states that Russia still wants to appear as a reliable trading partner for many countries, so the data must be complete and reliable.

At the request of Nieuwsuur, Sayari looked at her own data from the project 5712, which is the subject of our research. The company states that there are no indications that this data has been manipulated. Company experts call the data “consistent” with the other data in their database.

Sanctions

The databases contain information about products such as description, weight, quantity, price, and producer. It also states who paid for the products, the delivery address, and who shipped the products. The data also includes the country of origin and the location from which the products were shipped.

The HS codes (Harmonized System codes) are important in the data. This indicates which product group the shipment falls under. These HS codes are used for trading all over the world. The European Union also uses the codes when drawing up sanctions.

For example, the EU sanctions packages sanction microelectronics by referring to the corresponding HS codes. For this study, we compared those codes with the codes of the Russian import data and found many similarities. Also from European companies, including Dutch companies.

The HS codes of products sent for project 5712 often fall under the so-called Article 3k of the European Regulation 833/2014. According to this article of the European sanctions provision, it is not allowed to export products that “could contribute to strengthening Russia’s industrial capacity.”

New codes are constantly being added to the European sanctions lists. The codes we based on were added in February 2023. We have taken a margin of several months. Only from June 2023 will we count shipments in the data as potential sanction evasion.

The sanction rules have numerous exceptions. Sending a product that is on the sanctions list is therefore not immediately a violation. For example, products are sometimes still allowed to go to Russia if a contract had already been concluded before the product was sanctioned. And there are exceptions for medical products. We have asked several exporters to explain their shipments. In some cases this was given, in other cases it was not.

Companies

Contact was made with between ten and twenty companies for this research. Ten cases involved manufacturers of components for project 5712. Almost all of these suppliers stated that they supplied products for the project exclusively to Damen, and therefore did not ship their products directly to Russia or other countries.

The suppliers also say that Damen attempted to cancel contracts with the suppliers in the course of 2022, after the raid in Ukraine. In many cases the suppliers agreed to this.

What was striking in the databases of products that Russia imported is that many products for project 5712 remained the same before and after the sanctions came into effect. In many cases the description of the product was even an exact copy. This raised questions, because the shipper of the products had now changed: before the sanctions, Damen Shipyards shipped the products, after the sanctions this was mainly the Turkish Yamac Shipping and Logisitics Trade and FM Corporation (China) Limited from Hong Kong. Both Yamac, the parent company in Russia and FM did not respond to questions.

In some cases, the description of products contained many details about the product. We took these examples to suppliers. Three companies recognized the products and told us that they had supplied these products exclusively to Damen. Two companies only wanted to provide information anonymously, the German company Schottel did this in writing.

After the sanctions, deliveries were mainly via companies in Turkey and Hong Kong. As far as we could find, there was one notable exception in all the thousands of shipments. In the case of deck cranes from the Palfinger brand, we found an example where Damen is still the shipper of the product if the sanctions have already taken effect. Damen denies that this took place. Palfinger declined to respond to questions.

Several companies also did not recognize themselves in the data we presented. Usually, according to suppliers, shipments that had taken place were missing. A number of suppliers also said that the product descriptions were generic and they could not determine whether they were products they had supplied. There were also companies that did not respond substantively, but called the source of the data “doubtful”.

Ladies

Finally: We have had frequent contact with Damen Shipyards, the company that turned out to play a central role in our research, in recent months. We had telephone and background conversations and sent an extensive series of questions several times. We were also received at the head office in Gorinchem. It remains unclear how products ended up in Russia despite the sanctions. The company denies any involvement in sanctions circumvention. Damen does say that in 2023 it “sold a number of parts for fishing vessels to some foreign companies”. The company does not say which parts are involved, and which companies were in which countries.

Damen hitched one last year court case against the Dutch State to receive compensation for lost income from Russia as a result of the sanctions. During our investigation it turned out that the lawsuit largely revolved around the fishing vessels. The hearing in these proceedings was supposed to be last Monday, but Damen withdrew the case on November 15. Damen denies that this was related to our research. In an explanation, the company wrote: “In the current climate of increasing geopolitical tensions and good cooperation between industry and the Dutch government, Damen now chooses to close this chapter and look ahead.”