ASEAN Beat | Economy | Southeast Asia

Myanmar Using Fake Paperwork to Conceal Shipments of Iranian Jet Fuel, Reports Claim

Over the past few years, the country’s military has received hundreds of thousands of barrels of aviation fuel from Iran’s large tanker “shadow fleet.”

Myanmar’s military authorities have imported Iranian jet fuel using “sham paperwork” designed to circumvent the U.S. sanctions on both nations, according to reports published by Reuters and a local activist group yesterday.

The reports, which were based on shipping records, satellite imagery, and documents from Myanmar’s foreign exchange regulator and Ministry of Commerce, show how both the origin and content of the shipments were falsified. These shipments of jet fuel, which were disguised as diesel, have allowed the Myanmar Air Force to sustain its brutal air campaign against those opposing its coup d’etat in February 2021.

It has been clear for some time that Myanmar’s military was receiving fuel shipments from Iran’s large tanker “shadow fleet” – both Reuters and the rights group Amnesty International have reported on the issue – but the exact mechanism by which the shipments were being concealed was previously unknown.

The Reuters report traced the journey of a particular vessel, the U.S.-sanctioned tanker Reef, which arrived in Myanmar waters in December of last year with some 113,000 barrels of fuel aboard. As the report detailed, the shipment was ordered by Myanmar-based energy broker Dynamic Wave, which signed a $15.8 million sales ​contract with Thailand’s Tawan-Oil Trading “to supposedly take delivery of a similar amount of South African diesel.”

But the vessel really contained jet fuel from Iran, which Reuters verified both via documentary evidence and satellite images and analysis provided by SynMax Intelligence, “which tracked the tanker’s journey from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas to Southeast Asia.”

Myanmar’s military junta, which in April pupated into a quasi-civilian government under coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, was involved in concealing the origin and nature of the shipment. Days before the Reef arrived, Reuters stated, Myanmar’s foreign exchange regulator told the client of Dynamic Wave that it would issue import documentation that labeled the delivery as diesel “instead of ⁠jet fuel,” according to a copy of a November 30 letter seen by the news agency.

Reuters said that it received the document from the local activist group Justice for Myanmar (JFM), which also published a report yesterday providing more detailed evidence of how Myanmar and Iran had concealed the shipments. In its report, JFM stated that leaked import documentation “reveals a network of junta-linked businesses in Myanmar, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), for fuel declared as originating in or transiting through Singapore and South Africa.”

Between December 2024 and November 2025, JFM said that it identified records from the Myanmar Commerce Ministry for six shipments of jet fuel that included more than 843,000 barrels of aviation fuel, valued at $109.5 million. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that shipments of jet fuel between Iran and Myanmar have continued into 2026, stating that a tanker reached Myanmar in September.

According to previous reports, Iranian “shadow tankers” have also used a number of other methods to........

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