InDecember, South Korean shipping firm Sinokor Merchant Marine quietly started buying up supertankers. It marked a major shift for the 36-year-old company that had largely been focused on container shipping. Then in January, news broke that Sinokor was buying as many of the largest oil tankers—known as very large crude carriers, or VLCCs—that it could get its hands on.

“There's now a Korean company that has gone out berserkly and they're buying every single ship,” Nikolas Tsakos, founder of tanker firm Tsakos Energy Navigation, told Forbes in January. “The last month has been crazy.”

By the end of January, maritime freight management firm Veson Nautical estimated that Sinokor had spent more than $2.5 billion buying 35 tankers. By March, that was up to $3.3 billion for at least 60 ships.

But Sinokor may not have been acting alone. At the same time that Sinokor was making headlines with its buying spree, other reports started to emerge that suggested the world’s richest shipping tycoon Gianluigi Aponte (net worth $43.8 billion) was actually behind Sinokor’s spending spree. At the end of January, industry publication Lloyd's List wrote that Sinokor's purchases were “being funded by” Aponte but noted that the relationship remained “shrouded in secrecy,” while two shipowners who sold ships to Sinokor told Bloomberg in early February that the final buyer of their tankers was an “entity linked to” Aponte.

The two groups had already been doing business together. Aponte’s Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) was in talks in late 2025 to buy up to 30 container ships from Sinokor for more than $2.5 billion, and reportedly bought at least eleven.

In an effort to clarify the true ownership of the tankers, Forbes checked records for Sinokor’s tankers in maritime database Equasis and then dug into Panama corporate records, where many of the companies that own the ships are registered. Turns out that Aponte’s ties to Sinokor’s massive tanker spending are much deeper than previously known.

According to Equasis, 31 of the ships are ultimately owned not by Sinokor but by companies that all share the name “Haut Brion,” followed by a number. (Haut Brion is the name of a famed wine terroir in France's Bordeaux region.) Out of those 31, 11 are registered........

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