US sentences shadow fleet captain to 10 months for evading Coast Guard

Avtandil Kalandadze, a former master of a shadow fleet tanker that transported Iranian and Venezuelan oil, has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for refusing to obey US Coast Guard orders during a weeks-long pursuit across the Atlantic, US authorities have said.

The 47-year-old Georgian citizen pleaded guilty to failing to heave to a Coast Guard cutter, Caliber.Az reports, citing the US Department of Justice.

US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro noted that he will be deported after completing his prison sentence.

“Kalandadze captained a vessel used to conceal illicit oil shipments for U.S. adversaries, and when the Coast Guard ordered him to stop, he fled,” Pirro added.

According to him, this case demonstrates that those who try to evade US law enforcement even on the open sea will be held accountable.

“The ocean does not place anyone beyond our reach,” he stressed.

Kalandadze pleaded guilty on June 12 before Judge Beryl A. Howell. His plea agreement indicates he served as master of the motor tanker Bella 1 from September 2025 through late December 2025.

During that period, the tanker transported about 1.8 million barrels of Iranian-origin crude to Asia. Kalandadze also used techniques commonly employed to conceal a vessel’s activities, including disabling its Automatic Identification System (AIS) and hiding the Bella 1’s name while transferring Iranian oil to another vessel in a ship-to-ship operation.

In December 2025, the tanker was sailing toward Venezuela when it was intercepted by the US Coast Guard Cutter Munro. The Bella 1 refused orders to heave to and fled across the Atlantic, with the Munro pursuing it for several weeks.

On January 7, the Coast Guard assisted in the lawful seizure of the vessel.

During the pursuit, and acting on instructions from a representative of the company operating the tanker, Kalandadze took several measures to evade interception. These included ignoring repeated orders from authorised federal law enforcement officers to stop for the Munro and destroying records and other information aboard the Bella 1.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the FBI, with additional assistance from the Justice Department’s Money Laundering, Narcotics and Forfeiture Section and its Office of International Affairs.

The Justice Department also thanked personnel from the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Department of War for their assistance in the case.

The prosecution was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher T. Tortorice, Rajbir Datta and Jonathan Hornok for the District of Columbia, along with Acting Deputy Chief Sean R. Heiden of the Justice Department’s National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.

By Bakhtiyar Abbasov