SeaLead Shipping, a shipping company based in Singapore, filed a voluntary liquidation application at the end of July 2026 and, on 4 August, Cosimo Borrelli was appointed liquidator. Borrelli heads Kroll’s Asia-Pacific restructuring practice, which operates locally as Admiralty Asia Partners. The development, reported by Lloyd’s List, comes exactly one year after the first sanctions imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over the company’s links with Iran, while the company’s main container services, which connected Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, have ceased operating. Only a few days before the liquidation, the directors had declared the company solvent, with net assets of $37.4 million, about €32.4 million, and the ability to repay all debts within one year of the procedure starting.
SeaLead’s collapse, however, was not the result of a single measure, but of three separate waves of US Treasury sanctions against the Shamkhani network, the shipping and oil empire led by the Iranian magnate also known as Hector and Hugo Hayek. The first came on 30 July 2025, when OFAC designated more than 115 individuals, entities and vessels linked to Shamkhani’s shipping and oil empire, in what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described as the largest anti-Iran action since 2018. SeaLead did not appear as such in the measure, but it lost 16 of the vessels it had chartered, cancelling all related charters and giving up around a third of its operating capacity. A second wave, named Economic Fury, came on 15 April 2026, when OFAC targeted another two dozen individuals, companies and vessels in the network, including Oriel Group, House of Shipping Investment and the shell company Meritron DMCC, the latter involved in the purchase of two newbuild vessels in South Korea. At the same time, together with Homeland Security Investigations, it opened a separate line of inquiry into Iranian oil trafficked in exchange for Venezuelan gold for the benefit of Hezbollah. The final blow came on 14 July 2026, when OFAC directly designated Sea Lead Shipping and its subsidiaries in Dubai, the Marshall Islands and India, along with another 50 individuals, entities and vessels, bringing the total number of designations against the Shamkhani network to more than 200 since the summer of 2025. In the measure, the Treasury described SeaLead as one of the network’s “main container shipping companies”, with a role in transporting licit and illicit cargo to and from Iran, including cargo bound for the Houthis in Yemen.
Sources differ on the size of the remaining fleet. According to Splash247, at the time of the liquidation the company was operating only four vessels, with its global ranking having fallen to eightieth from a peak of thirteenth place reached in 2025, when the fleet comprised 53 chartered vessels with more than 208,000 TEU. The Maritime Executive, however, reported a remaining fleet of eight vessels totalling about 10,000 TEU at the time operations were halted, with the ranking falling to 24th, and said two of these units were placed under the Iranian flag in the days immediately before the liquidation in an attempt to keep them outside the procedure. The decline was already measurable months earlier: according to Linerlytica, SeaLead’s operated capacity had fallen to 14 vessels and 62,521 TEU as early as April 2026, also because of the temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which had blocked several units on the Far East-Persian Gulf route. In the same period, the company closed several overseas offices, reduced staff and reshuffled its leadership, promoting Cho Kit Wei from Chief Operating Officer to Chief Executive Officer.
In addition, on 6 March 2026 the US Department of Justice had already filed two civil forfeiture complaints with the federal court in Washington, for a total of $15.3 million, about €13.3 million, linked to the Shamkhani network. Of this amount, almost $13 million, about €11.2 million, relates to Wellbred Capital and its subsidiary Wellbred Trading DMCC, while $2.4 million, about €2.1 million, is specifically traceable to Sea Lead Shipping and its Indian affiliate. According to documents filed by the Department of Justice, Shamkhani allegedly maintained internal organisation charts that explicitly placed SeaLead within the structure of his network, a factor that complicates the company’s defence line, under which it has always been described as a mere customer-charterer rather than an integral part of the network. The regional context also weighed on operations: in addition to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, SeaLead had already withdrawn in April 2026 from the Australia-China service at the request of partners in the CA2 consortium, which were concerned about the company’s regulatory exposure.
But who is Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani? He was born in Tehran shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and is the son of Ali Shamkhani, former commander of the Pasdaran navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, who was killed on 28 February 2026 in an Israeli-US attack on the Iranian leadership that also struck Khamenei on the same day. Educated at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Hossein built his business interests away from the spotlight: his own father had publicly advised him in his youth to stay out of government. He later obtained Dominican citizenship through a passport-for-investment programme under the false name Hugo Hayek, a citizenship subsequently revoked by Dominica after the US sanctions.
The network that bears his name revolves around a pyramid structure of shell companies designed to make the beneficial ownership of vessels untraceable. Marvise SMC DMCC, based in the United Arab Emirates, provides management services to dozens of units that are formally owned by other companies, with Hossein personally supervising their operations from an office in Tehran. Until early 2025, much of the tanker fleet was controlled by Armada Global Shipping, another UAE front company. The network’s historical core is completed by Crios Shipping, which, according to the Treasury, was also involved in an exchange of missiles and drone components to Russia in return for oil, and Draco Buren Shipping, based in Singapore like SeaLead itself and able to manage up to 21 vessels at its peak, including container ships and tankers. On the financial side, Ocean Leonid Investments operates as a hedge fund with offices in Dubai, Switzerland and Singapore which, according to the Treasury, reinvested part of the oil profits in futures and securities. The links between this fund and JPMorgan Chase had already come under Treasury scrutiny at the end of 2024, months before the first direct sanctions against Shamkhani: the bank had provided leverage to Ocean Leonid, and US investigators wanted to verify whether customer due diligence procedures had been followed when the relationship was opened.
M.L.
