UK firm shipped $1.2bn of electronics to Russia
A British business registered to a terraced house in a north London suburb appears to have arranged the sale of about $1.2bn of electronics into Russia since Vladimir Putin’s "full-scale invasion" of Ukraine at the start of 2022, the Financial Times reported.
Mykines Corporation LLP, a company based in the London borough of Enfield, is listed in Russian records as having sent shipments including semiconductors, servers, laptops, computer components, telecoms network equipment and consumer electronics. The records list brands ranging from Huawei and H3C to Intel, AMD, Apple and Samsung.
According to these customs filings, at least $982mn of the goods listed as sent by Mykines are subject to restrictions on export by UK companies or individuals to Russia. Sale of these goods to Russia without permission from the UK authorities may constitute a breach of its sanctions, even though the goods shipped by Mykines entered Russia from other countries — largely China.
These findings raise questions over the effectiveness of the attempts to clamp down on Russia’s ability to obtain critical technologies used by the country’s military industrial complex.
The raw data analysed by the Financial Times was obtained from Maxim Mironov, a professor at IE Business School in Madrid who is an expert on analysis of customs flows. A subset of the records was corroborated by comparison to data from ImportGenius, a commercial customs data provider.
While many of the Mykines exports are consumer goods, they also include a large volume of high-end microchips, telecoms equipment and servers, which may support Russian infrastructure.