Confidential document: Islamic Republic oil in Hossein Shamkhani's hands and Chinese tanks

A confidential document from the Islamic Republic's oil ministry shows that Hossein Shamkhani, son of Ali Shamkhani, received Iranian oil from Tehran on trust and without collateral and sold it on the market, and that the regime has taken control of three jetties and seven oil storage tanks at four locations in China to sell sanctioned oil. Iran International published the document on Sunday 8 November.

The document is a letter from Hamid Bovard, former managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company and current acting oil minister. In it, Bovard replies to a top-secret letter that Ali Shamkhani, former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, wrote to Ali Khamenei calling the state of oil sales under Masoud Pezeshkian's government "catastrophic". Both were killed in the strikes of 28 February 2026.

Hossein Shamkhani and the "ghost" fleet

According to Bovard, Hossein Shamkhani bought ships with a government loan but used them mostly to carry Russian oil. The letter says the United Arab Emirates had become his private domain, to the point that the oil ministry had become his broker. The US Treasury has so far sanctioned 51 ships of Hossein Shamkhani's fleet.

Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani, a former member of parliament, has said that the head of NICO under Pezeshkian's government had dropped Hossein Shamkhani and three other middlemen because of debts of several billion dollars. Yet in Shahrivar this year (August–September 2026), Mohammad Javad Bavand, special assistant to the oil minister, assigned the sale of 86 million barrels of oil at an 8.5 percent discount to four middlemen, one of whom was Hossein Shamkhani.

The Islamic Republic's jetties and tanks in China

According to the document, one of the terminals is in the Ningbo-Zhoushan free zone, and shares in secondary jetties in Qingdao and another port in Shandong province were secretly bought. Of the seven purchased or leased tanks, four are in Dalian, Huizhou and two other coastal cities, and three are in the Ningbo-Zhoushan archipelago. Oil from these tanks is sold through middlemen to small Chinese refineries known as "teapots".

In the document, Bavand had asked Mohammad Hadi Mominin, a middleman with two billion dollars of debt, to store oil with Hossein Shamkhani's ship in one of these ports. Bovard's letter also says that before the forty-day war China rejected Tehran's request for a larger import quota, increased imports of Venezuelan oil and demanded bigger discounts. The oil ministry has denied claims that the discount on oil reached 9 dollars per barrel.

Oil money and people's tables

Amirabadi Farahani has said that the four middlemen met in a restaurant in Dubai hours after Khamenei was killed and concluded that there was no need to return the oil money. In the same months, the head of the social commission of the Islamic Republic's parliament said that eight million Iranians live in absolute poverty. The United States has also previously sanctioned exchange houses that partnered with the Islamic Republic in moving money.

The oil ministry document shows Ali Shamkhani's son took Iran's oil without collateral and the regime bought jetties and tanks in China to sell it.