Russia already took one family’s stake in its biggest Baltic oil terminal. Now it’s coming for the rest.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has filed a lawsuit with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region against Elena Vasilyeva, who owns 45% of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal (PNT), according to the St. Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka.
According to Dmitry Oktysyuk, a representative of the Vasilyev family, the lawsuit stems from a 2022 deal in which Sergei Vasilyev — one of the terminal’s co-founders — transferred the rights to his shares in the terminal from his Cypriot offshore company to himself personally. Later that year, after a serious illness, Vasilyev handed the business to his wife, Elena Vasilyeva, who became chair of the terminal’s board of directors.
Fontanka said that carrying out this kind of deal — the transfer of rights to Russian assets from foreign nationals to Russian nationals — requires approval from a government commission. Without such approval, the deal could be declared invalid.
The court has frozen the Vasilyevs’ shares and barred the couple from disposing of them.
Oktysyuk said the Vasilyev family learned of the lawsuit only through the court’s website. They won’t be able to obtain the text of the claim until September 7 — the earliest appointment they could get to review it. A hearing is scheduled for September 11.
The St. Petersburg Oil Terminal was founded in 1996 by Dmitry Skigin, and alongside him the port was controlled by businessman Ilya Traber, who is considered close to Vladimir Putin early in his St. Petersburg career. Today, PNT is Russia’s largest oil-products transshipment terminal in the Baltic region. In the late 1990s, Skigin’s partner Sergei Vasilyev became a co-owner of PNT; in 2022, he handed the business to his wife, Elena Vasilyeva.
After Dmitry Skigin’s death, his shares in PNT passed to his children. In July 2025, the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region ruled in favor of a Prosecutor General’s Office lawsuit seeking the seizure of that 55% stake. The suit was based on the foreign citizenship of Skigin’s heirs. In July 2026, Rosimushchestvo transferred the PNT shares seized by the court to the company Roskhim, which is linked to the family of Vladimir Putin’s friend Arkady Rotenberg.
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