One day in June, a tall, clean-cut 30-year-old, wearing shorts and Loro Piana loafers, ambled into La Guérite, one of the most exclusive restaurants in one of the most exclusive towns in France. Tables here are so coveted that even the wealthiest of its clientele book weeks in advance and have to wait in line under the sweltering sun to make the short crossing to the tiny Mediterranean island off the coast of Cannes where it is located. But the young man strolled straight to the front of the queue, on to the first available boat and onwards to his usual table at the restaurant.
Christopher Eppinger has been a regular since soon after he bought a €7mn villa in the hills on the mainland. On one of the whitewashed walls near where he was sitting, a solitary bronze plaque read: “Christopher Eppinger. The Legend of La Guérite. 300 bottles of Cristal, June 13, 2024.” It commemorated Eppinger’s 30th birthday, which was held on the terrace here a year earlier. It really was legendary, Eppinger told me as he ordered us his usual lunch: burrata, truffle pasta, lobster, côte de boeuf. The party started the night before at Eppinger’s mansion, where some of the guests arrived by helicopter, and continued the following day at La Guérite, where 300 golden bottles of Louis Roederer champagne, adorned with flaming sparklers, were carried into the restaurant on waiters’ shoulders.
Eppinger speaks with unfiltered confidence. His texts come in torrents, sometimes laced with abrasive and offensive language. At one point during our lunch, he pointed towards the ridge line of a hill in the distance, to the house he’d bought in 2024. He had named it Villa Mirta after his grandmother.
The house, which was undergoing a €14mn renovation, was just visible across the expanse of blue, as was a second property he was renovating for €5mn for his parents. The properties were just a part of his growing global portfolio, which includes several homes in Dubai. In time for his 40th, maybe he would add an island of his own.
Eppinger is able to afford such largesse because, between 2022 and 2025, he traded some $2bn worth of oil, making personal profits of more than $250mn. He is by no means the only trader to have made a fortune from the upheaval in the energy markets wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent global sanctions. But Eppinger, who was 27 when the war began, is almost certainly the youngest.
Following the 2022 invasion, western powers responded to Russian aggression with wide-ranging sanctions, and several of the world’s biggest traders, such as BP and Shell, quickly ceased all dealings with the country. Privately held commodity giants meanwhile pared back large parts of their business. Because oil was ultimately deemed too important to the global economy, the west eventually settled on a price cap designed to allow Russia to keep exporting while limiting the revenue it could earn. And so, a handful of risk-takers stepped in to profit from doing business that others were reluctant to touch.
The price cap proved especially helpful, Eppinger said. “It was a little bit of a black box” to begin with and then “I was sure I [could] do it in a legal structure”. Eppinger sipped on his Coke Zero. Had there been a complete embargo, as some traders had expected, then he would not have touched Russia at all. “Then I would’ve been a criminal.”
That risk perhaps explains why Eppinger is the only trader to have agreed to talk publicly about that period. Most of those who remained involved with Russian oil, whether or not they sought to comply with the west’s rules, have tried to say as little as possible about it. Eppinger, by contrast, named his company after himself.
Eppinger and his lawyers said that all of his trades have complied with the west’s rules and that his company, CE Energy, ceased trading Russian oil completely in February. But sanctions are political, not merely legal tools. In talking to the Financial Times, Eppinger was taking a big risk, offering an account of how the industry really responded to the west’s restrictions and how Russian oil then moved through the global energy system. Eppinger’s account was backed up by financial records, emails and chat messages, as well as interviews with more than a dozen people in the industry who have dealt with him.
Before, during and after lunch, he repeatedly asked me whether telling his story could get him sanctioned. And yet, he also seemed excited by the risk. Eppinger said he wanted to talk because he planned for this to be the start of his career and felt he would have to answer these questions eventually. “Because I’m not going to stop,” he said. “I’m not going to sit on the money and live from interest. I want to add another zero to my net worth and buy more Picassos.”
Eppinger was born in a small town north of Hamburg in 1994 into a fairly typical middle-class family. His parents, who were both born in the Soviet Union, had moved to Germany in the 1980s. His mother was a doctor and his father worked as an engineer. Less typically, Eppinger said all he ever wanted to be was an oil trader.
An only child, Eppinger regularly watched television with his German grandmother and was captivated by JR Ewing, the Stetson-wearing oil baron in the US television series Dallas. Andre van Gils, the father of Eppinger’s closest childhood friend, was something of a JR himself. Van Gils had been an early employee of the European oil-trading giant Vitol before setting up his own trading firms, minting a fortune along the way. As a teenager, Eppinger regularly spent holidays at the van Gils’ house in St Moritz. The veteran trader, then in his sixties, regaled Eppinger with trading tales.
One night at Chesa Veglia, an Italian restaurant, van Gils introduced the teenage Eppinger to Marc Rich, the infamous founder of Glencore who had fled to Switzerland in the 1980s after being indicted in the US for tax evasion linked to trading sanctioned oil with Iran. (Rich, who died in 2013, was later pardoned by Bill Clinton.) “I started to understand that the actual lawyers, doctors, engineers and all these [people with the] universities’ highest degrees are not sitting in St Moritz and drinking the champagne,” Eppinger said. “It’s actually these people who basically do something, who smell the sulphur . . . and do it globally, not only in Europe.” These were people who thought “outside of the box”.
Eppinger studied business at a university in Hamburg but itched to be out in the real world. At the end of his first year, aged 21 and with the help of another family friend, he got an internship with Kazakhstan’s national oil company, KazMunayGas, in the country’s capital, Astana. Officially, he was rotating through the firm’s asset management and strategy departments. But Eppinger spent most of the time making friends he thought would help him in the future.
Eppinger later parlayed his experience into a full-time job with a Hamburg-based commodity house, SET Select Energy. He hit it off with Select’s founder, Thure von Wahl, who had his own storied trading history. Von Wahl soon dispatched Eppinger back to Kazakhstan with $1mn to start a crude-processing business. He was 23.
One of Eppinger’s friends from KazMunayGas introduced him to a young Kazakh named Ilyas Tasmagambetov, who was the nephew of one of the country’s most powerful politicians. Tasmagambetov was now running an oil refinery that needed money, and Eppinger had it. “We went to all the local crude suppliers . . . and I bought it in cash on the fucking crude production fields,” Eppinger recalled. “We were trucking the oil into the refinery by weird small old cars. Everything is stinking. Minus 40C in winter, plus 40C in summer. You have sulphur in the air. If you’re there for too long, your teeth are starting to hurt . . . ” For Eppinger, it was paradise.
The profits were split between Select and Tasmagambetov’s refinery, but Eppinger made a side deal with his friends for a cut of the refinery’s end. He was getting paid twice. (Select and von Wahl declined to comment.) After two and a half years at Select, Eppinger set up his own company, based in Hamburg, and attempted to do the processing business himself. He raised about $900,000 from investors, put in $200,000 of his own money and sent it all to a new set of Kazakh partners. They promptly took the cash and disappeared.
The taxi snaked up a series of steep switchbacks before coming to a halt outside a grand villa with a classic canal-tile roof, manicured gardens and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. The house had previously been owned by one of France’s most infamous drug dealers, Eppinger said. “Everything was in marble, everything was pink, everything was gold.”
Now, all of that had been ripped out leaving gaps where the windows had been and dusty concrete floors. But the emptiness accentuated the home’s immense proportions, making it feel even more like a drug baron’s lair. The renovations at Villa Mirta were being led by a German architect and a British interior designer, with input from a director from London’s prestigious Gagosian gallery.
Eppinger, who looked at more than 20 properties before finding this one, was temporarily renting a different property for himself, his parents, his assistant, his housekeeper, his personal trainer and his one-year-old golden retriever, Bob. (For this story, I stayed at Eppinger’s home for two nights and accompanied him on a private jet.)
A team of Kurdish builders was ferrying cement back and forth as Eppinger and I toured the house. In the entrance hall, above our heads, they had demolished a mezzanine level to create a huge central atrium with 5m-high ceilings, where he imagined welcoming future guests. Off to one side, Eppinger showed me spaces intended for a 22-person dining room, a breakfast room, a cigar room and his office.
I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve been doing. I’m not scared to tell the people that the source of my business was Russian oil
The Gagosian director, who was immaculately dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots and a Gucci checked blazer, was chatting with the interior designer as we approached. She has helped Eppinger assemble a growing art collection and was there to discuss where certain pieces might be displayed. On an iPad she showed him a red hammer and sickle painted by Andy Warhol in 1976. Eppinger wanted to buy it to hang in the bar.
Eppinger, who is scared of heights, then led us up a crumbling spiral staircase and across a precarious wooden plank into what will be the master bedroom. For this room, Eppinger said he wanted to buy something by an Old Master, such as Caravaggio. Several of Caravaggio’s major works depicted decapitations, Eppinger explained. He wanted “something really intense”.
Elsewhere in the house, next to the underground gym, in the “wet area” that will be connected to the steam room, Eppinger planned for a famous mosaicist, Pierre Mesguich, to use solid gold to create a snake that rises from the corner of the room and gets larger as it moves across the wall like an “LSD dream”, he said. “He’s the OG of mosaics.”
Once completed, this sanctuary will be the base for his operations, at least for part of the year. Actually, his phone is the base for his operations. Eppinger said he never touches a computer and negotiates new contracts, executes trades and argues with lawyers and counterparties all from his iPhone. “It’s so fucking busy down there,” Eppinger said, waving an arm in the direction of Cannes. “Then you come here and you can be by yourself . . . I’m waking up. I’m going for a run. I’m doing my calls. I’m having all my screaming matches in the forest. I have my lunch. I jump into the pool. It’s just beautiful.”
In the months I spoke with Eppinger, he appeared to have a trader’s ability to make friends wherever he went. But there also seemed to be a combativeness lurking beneath the surface. “The whole industry is all ego-driven men, and it’s like a playground in high school, where everybody wants to beat each other up,” he told me. “You want to bully people and other people want to bully you, and it’s kind of the survival of the strongest.”
In the summer of 2021, Eppinger was back at square one. An investor in the failed Kazakh venture had accused him of fraud and his reputation in Hamburg suffered badly. (The investor later tried unsuccessfully to bring criminal charges against him. Eppinger has always denied wrongdoing and offered to repay the investor in full, according to correspondence seen by the FT.)
Eppinger called everyone he knew in the industry, looking for a fresh start. He landed a job at a small trading house in Dubai, and an opportunity soon presented itself in the form of a refinery in the Emirati port city of Fujairah. The facility took crude oil from Africa and low-sulphur fuel oil from Russia and refined it to make marine fuel, which it sold to the many ships that refuelled at the port. It was owned by the German utility Uniper.
Amid European uproar at the invasion, Uniper’s management in Düsseldorf decided it could no longer import Russian fuel oil or deal with its normal supplier due to that trader’s long-standing ties to Russian producers. It began to look for new supply and Eppinger, who had already built a close relationship with Lars Liebig, the refinery’s managing director, sensed a chance. He set about sourcing the oil himself.
After several dead ends, a contact suggested Eppinger try Mercantile & Maritime Group. M&M was a large international trading firm founded by a wealthy Pakistani-born trader named Murtaza Lakhani. In May 2022, it supplied Eppinger’s company, CE Energy, with a cargo of almost 60,000 tonnes of fuel oil from tanks in Europe for onward sale to Uniper. “The first cargo made me my first million bucks,” Eppinger said.
Hungry for more, Eppinger went looking for additional suppliers and agreed to buy 98,000 tonnes of fuel oil from Kazakhstan. Uniper knew the oil from the landlocked country would be loaded on to a ship at a Russian port, but when the cargo was already on the water, the refinery refused to take it. Uniper’s head office had received a report questioning the oil’s origin, claiming it had actually been produced in Russia, according to correspondence seen by the FT.
The next month was a blur. Eppinger owed his supplier about $100mn but now he had no buyer. Every day the ship idled off the coast of Fujairah cost him tens of thousands of dollars in additional shipping fees. It was an enormous exposure that threatened to destroy his fledgling operation. He hired the powerful US legal firm Latham & Watkins, which successfully obtained further documentation showing the oil’s origin as Kazakhstan and forced Uniper to accept the cargo.
But the episode was a wake-up call. There were no restrictions yet on buying Russian oil, but the continued expansion of western sanctions against Moscow was clearly making customers jumpy. The stand-off had also damaged Eppinger’s relationship with Uniper, so he started to look at alternative ways to deliver oil. From then, rather than dealing with the refinery directly, he would supply another company in Fujairah, Gulf Petrol Supplies LLC (GPS), which would in turn sell to Uniper.
Most importantly, rather than receiving the oil by ship, M&M introduced him to a new company, Tejarinaft, which had recently been incorporated in one of Dubai’s free zones and could deliver fuel oil once it had already arrived in the United Arab Emirates, through what is known as an inter-tank transfer. Tejarinaft started to supply CE Energy with as much as 180,000 tonnes of fuel oil a month, most of which it sent to GPS for onward sale to Uniper. (GPS did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Tejarinaft fuel oil had originally come from Russia, Eppinger said. But by the time it arrived with CE Energy, through the Fujairah tank system, it had a certificate showing that it had been blended in the UAE, which was good enough for CE Energy’s lawyers and, apparently, good enough for Uniper. CE Energy used the same fuel oil to supply Vitol, which also has a refinery in Fujairah. (Uniper and Vitol declined to comment.)
I’m not going to live from interest. I want to add another zero to my net worth and buy more Picassos
It also helped that another major barrier to entry had fallen. After the invasion, the reluctance of most banks to engage in any Russian business meant Russian producers were forced to sell to middlemen like Tejarinaft on open credit, allowing everyone in the supply chain to delay payment until after they had been paid by the end customer. The system provided a rare opportunity for tiny companies such as CE Energy, which never had more than a handful of staff, to move billions of dollars of oil and net outsized profits.
The price cap for refined oil came into effect in February 2023. Rather than halting CE Energy’s operations, Eppinger said the restrictions made things clearer. From then, every cargo he traded with a Russian certificate of origin was bought at a price below the cap, he said. A table of the company’s sale and purchase contracts provided by CE Energy’s lawyers supported this claim.
In other cases, the cargoes Eppinger bought were certified as having originated or been blended outside of Russia. Eppinger’s lawyers advised that under the west’s sanctions regulations, there was no requirement to verify the documentation. “When somebody has a certificate,” Eppinger explained, “by an authority, which is accepted by the government, then it’s a fact.”
In total, between 2022 and 2025, CE Energy traded 3.3mn tonnes of oil, supplying customers in countries including Nigeria, the Bahamas and Spain. In Brazil, it sent Russian diesel to Brazilian energy company Raízen, which is co-owned by Shell. In China, the UAE and Malaysia, it delivered Vitol more than 300,000 tonnes of fuel oil direct from Russian ports, in addition to nearly 400,000 tonnes it supplied to the trader through the Fujairah tank system. (Raízen and Shell declined to comment.)
At least three-quarters of all the oil CE Energy supplied came from Tejarinaft and two other companies also introduced to Eppinger by Lakhani. By 2024, the pair would meet regularly in Dubai, have an expensive meal and discuss trades, Eppinger recalled. They also regularly discussed trades by text, WhatsApp messages show. In May that year, he partied with Lakhani, now in his sixties, at the Monaco Grand Prix.
But their relationship eventually broke down, partly over money. In voice messages he sent to Eppinger, which the FT has heard, Lakhani credited himself for much of Eppinger’s financial success. Eppinger bristled at the idea. At times, Eppinger flooded Lakhani’s phone with offensive, racist messages. (He told me he regretted sending them and had apologised.)
Lakhani’s lawyers said he wound down “commercial activity with Russia” following the February 2022 invasion and referred M&M’s “Russian trading clientele” to other companies. Lakhani’s involvement with the three companies he introduced to CE Energy was “strictly advisory”, they said. Lakhani “does not own or control” any of the businesses but has provided them with “ad hoc advice and assistance”, they added. A lawyer representing Tejarinaft’s registered owner said Lakhani had provided “ad hoc client introductions” but had no “direct or indirect relationship” with the company.
As the Cessna 680 accelerated down the runway at Nice in June, Eppinger and his commercial director Liebig relaxed into the aircraft’s plush leather seats. Liebig, who had joined CE Energy from Uniper, was visiting from Dubai, where Eppinger had just renamed the company Petrichor, having decided it had outgrown using his initials.
Eppinger had stopped all activity earlier in the year after outgoing US president Joe Biden announced sanctions against several Dubai-based traders. The moves appeared to indicate a new willingness to sanction companies for trading Russian oil at any price. Following consultation with his lawyers, Eppinger decided the west’s enforcement of the rules had become too unpredictable, making the risks of continuing too great. This also meant the open credit that had facilitated his activities would no longer be available, so Eppinger and Liebig were headed to Geneva for a first round of discussions with banks about future non-Russian business. The plan was to be open with the lenders about the company’s previous trades. “I can’t hide it because every banker who gets my numbers will understand where it’s coming from. It’s not dropping on you just like a present from God,” he said.
“I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve been doing,” he said. “Maybe I will have to answer the question of ‘Has everything been below the cap?’, but it was below the cap, so . . . I’m not scared to tell the people that the source of my business was Russian oil.” He was optimistic that the banks would see value in the company’s balance sheet and provide the credit lines needed to take his company to the “next level”. “I’m good at relationships. Can I trade better than a trader at Vitol? No. Can I leverage my contacts better? Yes.”
In a later conversation, Eppinger admitted that he had once felt jealous of older traders, like van Gils, von Wahl, perhaps even Lakhani, who had lived through great disruptions, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the commercial opportunities it generated. “I was literally sad that the ’90s passed without me,” he said. But he wasn’t any more. “I think what has been happening right now is very similar,” he said. “There will be an opportunity every five years but, in between those opportunities, it’s important to . . . be able to execute when you have to execute.” Earning more money was no longer his main goal. “It is not about the number, it’s about staying in the game.”
After we landed in Switzerland, a waiting car whisked us to lunch with a potential new chief financial officer. I left Eppinger and Liebig to have their bank meetings. Afterwards, Eppinger seemed happy. Several of the discussions had gone well, he thought. He’d told the bankers he had travelled to Switzerland with the FT, he said. They replied that they planned to read the resulting article closely.
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