A British enterprise registered to a terraced home in a north London suburb seems to have organized the sale of about $1.2bn of electronics into Russia since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine firstly of 2022.

Mykines Company LLP, an organization based mostly within the London borough of Enfield, is listed in Russian information as having despatched shipments together with semiconductors, servers, laptops, laptop parts, telecoms community gear and shopper electronics. The information listing manufacturers starting from Huawei and H3C to Intel, AMD, Apple and Samsung.

Based on these customs filings, not less than $982mn of the products listed as despatched by Mykines are topic to restrictions on export by UK firms or people to Russia. Sale of those items to Russia with out permission from the UK authorities could represent a breach of its sanctions, although the products shipped by Mykines entered Russia from different nations — largely China.

These findings increase questions over the effectiveness of the makes an attempt to clamp down on Russia’s capacity to acquire vital applied sciences utilized by the nation’s navy industrial advanced.

The uncooked knowledge analysed by the Monetary Instances was obtained from Maxim Mironov, a professor at IE Enterprise College in Buenos Aires who’s an knowledgeable on evaluation of customs flows. A subset of the information was corroborated by comparability to knowledge from ImportGenius, a industrial customs knowledge supplier.

Whereas lots of the Mykines exports are shopper items, in addition they embody a big quantity of high-end microchips, telecoms gear and servers, which can assist Russian infrastructure.

A UK authorities spokesman stated: “All companies registered within the UK are sure by regulation to adjust to the Russia sanctions regime. We take potential breaches very significantly, however don’t talk about the small print of how we implement commerce sanctions for particular circumstances.”

The commerce additionally raises questions on the usage of British secrecy jurisdictions. Mykines’ accounts from earlier years present that at the moment it handed its earnings on to its homeowners — two entities within the British Virgin Islands whose possession is unknown.

The FT visited the terraced home the place Mykines is registered in Southgate, an space of Enfield. It’s considered one of two energetic firms registered to the tackle, which is owned by Savvas Themistocleous, the Cyprus-based proprietor of a fiduciary service. In 2013, he arrange an organization wherein he was the only director referred to as “Russian Buying and selling Firm Ltd”.

Themistocleous instructed the FT that he would go on inquiries to the listed proprietor of Mykines — Vitalii Poliakov, a 53-year-old Ukrainian, who’s described as resident in Ukraine. Based on Molfar, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence group, just one individual matches the given description of Poliakov — a street employee employed by a Ukrainian state mining concern. He didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Till final August, the controlling proprietor of Mykines was listed as a 34-year-old Ukrainian girl born in the identical city as Poliakov. Based on an internet testimonial posted in 2018, she attended a two-week English language course at a small faculty in London and stayed with a bunch household. Her public Instagram web page lists her actions as an IT skilled and pole dancer. She didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Mykines had been energetic in Russia previous to the invasion, however the information indicate its enterprise with the nation all of the sudden took off after the onset of the battle.

The opposite agency listed on the Enfield tackle, Denirello LLP, had been energetic in promoting comparable items to Russia earlier than the battle, however seems to have wound down and ceased exporting to Russia as harder sanctions have been launched in 2022. Denirello described itself as “a dynamic diversified firm distributing medical, industrial and IT gear in Russia and CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States]”.

The overwhelming majority of the ten,600 batches of products are listed as having been despatched to Marsala, a Moscow-based firm. Russian information present it imports little or no besides from Mykines. The corporate seems to be strongly linked to Merlion, a big computing and electronics distributor inside Russia. Marsala and Merlion have been approached for remark.

Whereas many of the items look like primarily civilian in nature, Marsala has declared in Russian official listings that considered one of its counterparties is Microcontract, an organization that owns a three way partnership with Novgorod State College Engineering Heart. This centre, launched in collaboration with Rostec, the huge state-owned navy conglomerate, lists its areas of analysis as together with aviation and drones, microelectronics, sensors and industrial electronics.

Among the customs information have errors — or could have been the topic of subterfuge. For instance, there are six entries logging the import of paper. However the implied value of this paper is, in some circumstances, $500,000 a kilogramme. The purported paper can be listed as having been made by Huawei and New H3C Applied sciences, Chinese language high-end expertise firms.