The chief executive of a UK oil and gas firm is being sued by a former company he headed for embezzling funds from sales from an Iranian petrochemicals company designated by the United States.
Francesco Mazzagatti, an Italian national who is CEO and majority owner of UK-based Viaro Energy, is accused by a Singaporean trading company that he headed in 2018-2020 of embezzling money and forging documents as part of a scheme to steal funds from product sales of Iran’s Mehr Petrochemical Company.
The Iranian firm was designated in 2023 by the U.S. Treasury for being part of a significant “shadow banking” network.
Alliance Petrochemical & Investment (API), the Singaporean company in which Mazzagatti was CEO between July 2018 and September 2020, partially owns Mehr Petrochemical Company.
The Singapore-based company alleges in a lawsuit in the High Court in London that Mazzagatti embezzled $151.6 million (143.8 million euros) through product sales of Mehr Petrochemical by forging bank and board documents to divert money to a separate company he has set up in the UAE, the Financial Times reports.
The lawsuit also alleges that Mazzagatti used part of the money to finance the 2020 Viaro Energy acquisition of RockRose Energy.
Since this acquisition, Viaro Energy has acquired 16 non-operated gas interests in the UK.
The most recent deal is a high-profile one—earlier this year, Viaro Energy signed an agreement with Shell and ExxonMobil to acquire a full ownership interest in their Shell-operated UK Southern North Sea assets. The deal has yet to be approved by UK regulators.
Mazzagatti denies all allegations and says the lawsuit has been orchestrated by a third party, Arshiya Jahanpour, a former close friend of his.
The Italian executive’s defense claims that the bank accounts Mazzagatti has opened were “opened by or at the request of Mr Jahanpour, and Mr Jahanpour controlled them at all material times,” FT quotes court documents as saying.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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