Treasury Sanctioned Whales Shipping Line. Its Company Profile Still Names Its Staff.

Who is Whales Shipping Line, the Dubai ship agent the Treasury Department sanctioned on October 21, 2026, and what does the public record show about it?

Whales Shipping Line LLC is a small Dubai shipping agency that the Treasury Department sanctioned on October 21, 2026, for supporting Amigoz Singapore, a port agent that Treasury says provided bunkering services to an Iranian shadow fleet vessel. Its own company profile, still online on its website, lists its offices, landlines, and two named staff contacts. Its two blocked boats tell a less tidy story: one broadcasts identifiers that differ from OFAC’s listing, and the other has not appeared on free tracking sites since December 17, 2025.

Editor’s note: The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added Whales Shipping Line LLC, Amigoz Singapore Pte. Ltd., Roxette Maritime Shipping and Trading S.A., the law firm Karnakis and Karnakis, five people tied to the firm, and nine vessels to its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List on October 21, 2026, under Executive Order 13902, which Treasury says “targets the Iranian petroleum and petrochemical sectors”. No Whales employee is on that list.

What Did OFAC Say About Whales Shipping Line?

Treasury’s press release describes Whales in two sentences. “Whales Shipping Line LLC (Whales), a Dubai-based maritime and logistics company, acted as the shipping agent for Sparrow Trading FZE, a sanctioned Dubai-based front company that organized the purchase of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian petrochemicals in coordination with Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industry Commercial Co.” It adds, “Whales has also conducted business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with Amigoz.”

Treasury designated Whales “for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Amigoz Singapore PTE. Ltd.” It blocked two boats as Whales’s property and said, “Whales is the registered owner of two UAE-flagged small support vessels.”

Whales’s OFAC entry lists Dubai license 681649, Chamber of Commerce number 213388, registration number 1107940, business registration number 10889096, company IMO number 6417176, an establishment date of January 9, 2013, the website www.whalesshipping.com, and two Dubai addresses: Office 412, Parcel 243-210, Al Qusais Industrial Second, Deira; and 405 Al Mansour Building, Damascus Road, Al Qusais. It is tagged [IRAN-EO13902] and marked “Linked To: AMIGOZ SINGAPORE PTE. LTD.” The entry names no owner, manager, or employee.

Treasury describes the role of shipping agents in general terms: “Shipping agents play a critical role in shadow fleet operations by aiding the transit of illicit Iranian cargo through ports, including oil, petroleum, and other commodities.”

What Does Whales’s Own Company Profile Show?

Whales’s website links to a company profile, a PDF that its metadata says was created in Microsoft Word on February 25, 2022. It was still online on October 21, 2026. It describes the business in the company’s own words: “Whales Shipping is one of the trusted name in the region for Shipping Agency Services and Tanker Operations with specialized experts from agency, vessel handling and terminal services.”

The services it lists sit close to the activity Treasury describes. It offers “TANKER OPERATIONS – OIL/CHEMICAL tanker operations” and says, “LPG STS– VLGC/GC Ship to Ship cargo operation at anchorage and berth can be arranged with full set of LPG STS gears” (an STS, or ship-to-ship, transfer moves cargo from one vessel to another). Under bunkering, the supply of ship fuel, it lists “High Seas Bunkering.” It also offers help “Assisting vessel owners for obtaining required Class/Flag approvals.” The profile does not name any client, vessel, or cargo.

The profile gives a head office at 121 A, Al Shaali Building, Dubai, with landline +971 4 238 3390 and fax +971 4 238 3394, and lists branches in “Sharjah & Fujairah- U A E” and “Sohar - Oman”. Its contacts page names two people. Ibnu Mazood is listed for the Fujairah office at 505 Welfare Building, Port Street Area, with landline +971 9 222 9103, a mobile number, and the address ibnu@whalesshipping.com. Faizal K is listed for the Dubai office, with the Dubai landline, a mobile number, and faizal@whalesshipping.com. Neither person is designated by OFAC, and neither name appears in Treasury’s release.

The Dubai address in the 2022 profile is out of date. Archived copies of the company’s contact page show “121 A, Al Shaali Building” in February 2018 and “405, Al Mansour Building” by September 2018, the second of the two addresses on OFAC’s list. The Dubai landline and fax are the same in both.

An October 22, 2019, snapshot of whalesshipping.com shows a nine-page site listing the same Dubai landline and fax, the address opsdubai@whalesshipping.com, and the two mobile numbers the 2022 profile gives for Ibnu Mazood and Faizal K. Whales’s current site still lists both mobiles, including the one OctoProbe’s search tied to the “Ibnu Whales” Facebook account, along with a newer number on its contact page. Archived snapshots on the Internet Archive and archive.ph preserve a site’s structure as it stood years earlier, so an investigator can follow its phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, and payment links over time and pivot from each, and EXIF metadata in its images can record a camera, editing software, or date. Three of the images in the 2019 snapshot carry EXIF data, which has not been reviewed.

The Fujairah number matches an official record. The Port of Fujairah’s list of registered shipping agents, dated March 19, 2025, includes “WHALES SHIPPING LINE LLC” with the number 2229103 and the address opsfuj@whalesshipping.com.

What the Identifiers Show About the Two Contacts

OctoProbe ran the profile’s names, numbers, and addresses through its identifier search. The results below tie accounts to Whales’s published contact details. They show which identifiers match. They do not prove who operates each account.

The Dubai landlines. A lookup on DeHashed, a commercial search service, returned a record whose listed source database is Bureau van Dijk, a company-data provider. The record names “Mr Faisal Coti,” lists the company “Whales Shipping Line L.L.C” and the website www.whalesshipping.com, and gives the numbers 42383390 and 42383394. With the UAE country code added, those are +971 4 238 3390 and +971 4 238 3394, the Dubai landline and fax in Whales’s profile and on its website since at least 2016. They are office lines, so the match ties the record to the company, not to one person. The record’s addresses, including “Plot No. 242412” and “western, amman, United Arab Emirates,” do not match any Whales address in OFAC’s entry or the profile. The underlying Bureau van Dijk entry has not been reviewed.

Editor’s note: Arabic and other non-Latin names are routinely written in Latin letters in more than one way, so “Faisal” and “Faizal,” or “Coti,” “Koti,” and longer family names such as “Kuzhilanghattil,” can refer to one person or to different people. OFAC’s guidance on screening tells users to look beyond spelling. Its Sanctions List Search uses “character and string matching as well as phonetic matching”, and its guidance on confirming a match says to “compare all of the details in the OFAC listing with the information available to you”, including identifiers such as “passport, tax ID, national identification numbers, place of birth, date of birth, business registration numbers, or known addresses”. This article matches people to Whales by phone numbers, email addresses, and employers, not by spelling.

The Dubai contact. OctoProbe’s search on the contact details the profile lists for Faizal K returned a Facebook account named “Faizal Kuzhilanghattil.” The account is locked: it shows no workplace, school, or posts to the public. The first name and the identifier match are the only ties; the profile itself does not mention Whales. OFAC’s list has no entry for Faizal or Faisal K., Coti, Koti, or Kuzhilanghattil.

Faces of minors obscured by OctoProbe.

The Fujairah contact. For Ibnu Mazood, OctoProbe’s search on the mobile number the profile lists for him returned a Facebook account at facebook.com/ibnumazood, a username that matches the name in the profile. The account displays the name “Ibnu Whales” and self-reports its employer as “Whales Shipping Line LLC,” in Dubai. It also lists the College of Co-operation & Banking at Kerala Agricultural University in Thrissur, India, and Kerala Agricultural University, 1992–1997. The profile PDF places Ibnu Mazood in Fujairah, not Dubai. OFAC’s list has no entry for Ibnu Mazood.

Faces of minors obscured by OctoProbe.

Neither man nor Whales Shipping Line was contacted before publication.

Why Doesn’t Whales’s Website Hold Up?

Whales’s current website is built on Transplix, a commercial template sold by the developer KodeSolution; the site’s style sheet carries the header “Template Name: Transplix.” Much of the copy is the template’s placeholder text. The testimonials section shows three customers, each named “David Hume” and titled “CEO,” each with the same line: “With over four decades of experience providing solutions Everything you need to start selling.” The template’s public demo page has the same three cards, credited “David Hume, CEO, Transflix.” Whales deleted only the word “Transflix,” which is why its cards read “CEO,” with nothing after the comma.

The three faces on Whales’s cards are the demo’s images. OctoProbe compared the files pixel by pixel and found no difference. The home page also keeps the demo’s banner, edited to read “Finest global Shipping and Logistics solutions Company 2000,” though OFAC lists the company as established in 2013, and the demo’s FAQ, which asks “You offers cost effecient ?” Every one of the 126 social media icons across the site’s pages links to “#,” a placeholder that goes nowhere. Two links on the home page, to its ship and port agency and crew-change pages, return “File not found.”

The template is recent; the company is not. Whales’s domain was registered on February 7, 2013, four weeks after the founding date on OFAC’s list. Archived copies show a plainer, hand-built site from 2016 until the template first appears on February 6, 2025. DXB360, a directory of Dubai registry data, lists license 681649, the number on OFAC’s entry, as an active single-owner LLC registered in 2013. The company was on the Port of Fujairah’s registered-agent list in March 2025, and its email runs on Google Workspace, a service used by millions of businesses. The record fits a small, real agency behind a placeholder website.

Whales’s social media presence is just as loose. The site links to none of its accounts, but two LinkedIn company pages exist: “Whales Shipping Line,” which lists 51 to 200 employees, and “Whales shipping Line LLC,” which lists two to ten.

What Do the Two Whales Ships’ Signals Show?

Both boats are small crew and supply vessels. Whales’s own fleet page lists WHALES DIAMOND as 33 meters long, carrying seventy-three passengers, based at Khalid Port, and WHALES PEARL as 33 meters, fifty passengers, at Khorfakkan Port. It also lists two smaller boats, Whales Star and Whales Ruby, which are not on OFAC’s list.

WHALES DIAMOND. OFAC lists WHALES DIAMOND, IMO 9375032, built in 2006, under the UAE flag with MMSI 470132000 and call sign A6E2076. An MMSI is the nine-digit number a ship’s tracking transponder broadcasts; an IMO number stays with the hull for life. On October 21, the same IMO number was broadcasting on VesselFinder under MMSI 470530000 and call sign A6E2292. It left Sharjah at 2:15 p.m. EDT that day, hours after the designation, and was under way near 25°N, 55°E at 5:53 p.m. EDT. On MyShipTracking, another free tracking site, OFAC’s MMSI was being broadcast that day by a different, unrelated vessel, a tug named SPEARFISH ANN 2 (IMO 9075773). Third-party ship databases list former names BAYCORP IPOH and STERLINK COURAGE for the IMO. The pattern is consistent with the boat having been re-registered with new identifiers since OFAC’s data was compiled, not with spoofing, but that could not be confirmed with the UAE registry. Anyone screening by OFAC’s MMSI alone would hit the tug.

WHALES PEARL. OFAC lists WHALES PEARL, IMO 9483114, built in 2008, UAE flag, MMSI 470034000, with no call sign. VesselFinder showed no position for it on October 21. Its last free public fix, on MyShipTracking, was at 11:34 a.m. EST on December 17, 2025, inside the port of Khor Fakkan. Free sites rely on shore-based receivers and cannot tell whether a boat switched its transponder off, stayed in a coverage gap, or stopped sailing.

How Does Whales Connect to Amigoz and the Wider Network?

OFAC’s only listed link for Whales is to Amigoz Singapore Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company established on November 27, 2019, at Thye Hong Centre, 2 Leng Kee Road. Treasury says Amigoz “acted as the agent for a shipment of light crude oil overseen by Sepehr Energy Jahan Nama Pars Company” and “provided bunkering services to the Iranian shadow fleet vessel ZIXUAN (IMO 9317298)”. ZIXUAN was sanctioned in an earlier action and is on the map below.

The same October 21 action targeted a second network. Treasury sanctioned the Panama- and Greece-based law firm Karnakis and Karnakis and the ship manager Roxette Maritime Shipping and Trading S.A., “for which Karnakis and Karnakis serves as the corporate agent”, along with Roxette’s seven Panama-flagged cargo ships. Treasury says the firm’s employees, “including Panamanian national Roberto Ortega Jones, act as directors and officers of many of the companies they register in order to obfuscate the true beneficial owners of these companies”. OFAC’s address data puts the firm on the twenty-first floor of the Global Plaza Building on Calle 50 in Panama City; OFAC lists the same floor and building for five other designated companies: Elias Shipping and Trading Group, Brilliance Maritime Ventures, Poros Maritime Ventures, Aquila Worldwide Marine Developments, and Veinto Global Marine. All but Brilliance, which OFAC lists under a counterterrorism program, are designated under Iran sanctions. OctoProbe’s companion report on Karnakis and Karnakis traces the firm’s record from the first public report in 2023 to the designation.

Neither Treasury nor OFAC links Whales or Amigoz to Karnakis and Karnakis or to Roxette. The two networks share a press release, not a documented connection. Treasury’s October 15 designation of Iraq’s International Development Bank is a separate action from both.

Where Are the Sanctioned Ships Now?

Five of the eleven sanctioned vessels on the map below reported a position within forty-eight hours of OctoProbe’s check on October 21. VesselFinder’s free pages round positions to the nearest whole degree of latitude and longitude, so the map shows approximate areas, not exact positions, and can be off by tens of miles. Four ships sit at or near anchorages off Oman and the UAE that also serve ordinary Gulf trade; waiting there is not on its own evidence of evasion.

What Remains Unknown?

• Who owns Whales. Public directory pages show a single-owner LLC but no owner name.
• What Whales did for Sparrow Trading FZE and Amigoz beyond Treasury’s two sentences, and when.
• Whether WHALES DIAMOND was re-registered and when, and where WHALES PEARL has been since December 17, 2025.
• Whether the people named in Whales’s 2022 profile still work there.

What Has Historically Worked Against Shadow-Fleet Networks?

Government guidance has long treated a change of flag as a routine evasion step. The maritime sanctions advisory that Treasury, the State Department, and the Coast Guard issued on May 14, 2020, warns that bad actors “may also repeatedly register with new flag states (“flag hopping”) to avoid detection”, and that “Vessels involved in illicit activities have often painted over vessel names and IMO numbers”. The ships in this article fit that record. According to VesselFinder’s ship histories, four of Roxette’s seven ships were renamed and moved from South Korean to Panamanian registry between 2023 and 2025, and ZIXUAN switched from Vanuatu’s flag to Barbados’s in 2026. WHALES DIAMOND now broadcasts identifiers that differ from OFAC’s listing.

The same advisory points insurers at the people and companies behind a ship. It tells maritime insurers to watch for AIS gaps, warns that tampering “could result in cancellation of insurance”, and urges them to share word of “insurance denial or cancellation of services of a vessel in relation to illicit activity”. The International Group of P&I Clubs, an association of shipowners’ liability insurers, responded that “All clubs in the International Group now monitor the AIS transmissions of all entered vessels in High risk Areas”, while warning that its members faced legal limits on what they could disclose. The advisory also notes that bad actors use “complex business structures, including those involving shell companies and/or multiple levels of ownership and management, to disguise the ultimate beneficial owner”.

Treasury’s October 21 action follows that second line. It named the law firm it says registered the companies, the employees it says served as their directors, and the agents it says handled their cargo. The record collected here sits in the same layer: Whales’s staff contacts and phone numbers in its own profile, a Panama office floor that OFAC lists for the law firm and five designated companies, and Karnakis employee Roberto Ortega Jones, whom Treasury describes as one of the firm’s staff who serve as directors and officers of the companies it registers. A new flag or a new MMSI does not change any of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Whales Shipping Line LLC?

A Dubai shipping agency, licensed since 2013, that Treasury sanctioned on October 21, 2026, for supporting Amigoz Singapore Pte. Ltd. Treasury says it acted as the shipping agent for Sparrow Trading FZE.

Which Whales ships are sanctioned?

WHALES DIAMOND (IMO 9375032) and WHALES PEARL (IMO 9483114), two UAE-flagged crew and supply boats. Whales Star and Whales Ruby, also on the company’s fleet page, are not.

Are Whales employees sanctioned?

No. OFAC’s entry for Whales names no individuals, and no Whales staff member is on OFAC’s list.

Is Whales connected to Karnakis and Karnakis?

Not in any OFAC or Treasury document. Both were sanctioned on the same day, but OFAC links Whales only to Amigoz Singapore.

Why does WHALES DIAMOND’s MMSI differ from OFAC’s?

The boat broadcasts MMSI 470530000, while OFAC lists 470132000, which another vessel now uses. That pattern suggests re-registration, but it is unconfirmed.

Colin Aamot is an investigative journalist and OSINT domain expert specializing in FOIA and public records. A technologist, U.S. Army veteran, and former Capitol Hill staffer, he has held director roles across the private and public sectors.Full bio