The US Treasury may have sanctioned Kunlun Shipping but it has done a poor job of finding it.
This morning TradeWinds visited 815 East Daming Road, the Shanghai address by which the US authorities identified the Chinese shipping company, and security and housekeeping staff said Kunlun had moved out two or three months ago.
Kunlun is one of six Chinese shipping companies sanctioned this week by Washington officials, who also hit five individual directors with economic penalties for defying a US ban on trading with Iran.
VLGC operator Kunlun was on the list, along with its affiliate Kunlun Holdings and two of the Dalian-based tanker shipping entities in the state-owned Cosco group.
Although the reach of the sanctions is limited to the named entities and their corporate subsidiaries, China Cosco Shipping and its main tanker owning entity Cosco Shipping Energy Transportation (CSET) have scrambled to deal with the consequences this week, and CSET shares have been suspended from trading.
International traders and oil majors have also had to tackle the question of how to avoid the legal contagion of potentially sanctioned tonnage.
Some Shanghai shipping sources believe Kunlun has moved into posher quarters on the city's former colonial Bund waterfront district but the new headquarters could not immediately be located.
Three Kunlun Shipping chartering and shipmanagement officials contacted for comment hung up the phone immediately when a TradeWinds reporter identified himself.
Kunlun's recently vacated address is only steps from two other names on the sanctions list.
The East Daming Road street number and the one adjacent belong to a rambling and aspirationally Victorian building that was originally put up in 1915 as the Nanyang Bros Tobacco Co cigarette factory and now houses office and retail space.
Security guards point to a modest two-story outbuilding of newer date as Kunlun's former home.
But immediately across the road at 888 East Daming Road is a large handsome luxury apartment complex called New Bund Garden. The same US Treasury document identifies this as the home of sanction target Xu Bin.
Xu was identified last year in a report by S&P Global Platts as a director of Hong Kong-based Kunlun Holdings and sole shareholder of another sanctioned entity, China Concord Investment Co Ltd.
TradeWinds did not succeed in contacting Xu Bin during the visit and he did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.
The New Bund Garden complex in which the US believes Xu lives looks southward across the Huangpu River at the skyscrapers of Shanghai's Pudong Lujiazui business district and northward to the former Kunlun headquarters, but its immediate neighbour to the west is the headquarters of Cosco Shipping Energy Transportation (CSET).
Although CSET is not named in the US sanctions announcement, the alleged trading with Iran is understood to have been done from CSET headquarters at 670 East Daming Road.
Cosco's tanker fleet is historically based in the northeastern Liaoning province port of Dalian, where the sanctioned Cosco entities are located, but TradeWinds understands that only technical and crewing functions remain there now, while ownership and chartering have effectively all been transferred to Shanghai over recent years.
The connection between Cosco Dalian and CSET is close enough, however. CSET asked the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Shanghai Stock Exchange to suspend its shares from trading in the wake of the sanctions news.
A press representative of CSET has not responded to a request for comment from TradeWinds.
