TankerTrackers.com Helped Track Alleged Iranian Shipments to India's Adani Group
Co-founder Samir Madani’s TankerTrackers.com provides intelligence on oil shipping to traders and governments
(Video: Samir Madani, CNBC interview, 2020)
June 7, 2025
In 2024, a group of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tankers, making journeys between Mundra, India, and the Persian Gulf, showed signs that ship trackers say are typically evidence of ships attempting to obscure their movements, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. The obscuring is often done by manipulating a ship’s automatic identification system, or AIS.
The AIS of one of the ships, the Panamanian flagged SMS Bros, showed it as being docked at Khor al Zubair, Iraq. Satellite images showed the ship was docked 315 miles away, in Tonbuk, Iran, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told the Journal.
United States prosecutors are investigating whether the Adani companies “are buying Iranian petrochemical products,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal this week.
“All purchases of Iranian Oil, or Petrochemical products, must stop, NOW!,“ U.S. President Donald Trump posted last month on the Truth Social platform. “Any Country or person who buys ANY AMOUNT of OIL or PETROCHEMICALS from Iran will be subject to, immediately, Secondary Sanctions. They will not be allowed to do business with the United States of America in any way, shape, or form.”
The Journal report is "baseless and mischievous" according to a statement from the Adani Group, Reuters reported. The statement added that the group did not handle any cargo from Iran at its ports, as a matter of policy, and was “not aware of any investigation by U.S. authorities on this subject."
Mundra is the largest port in India and is run the Adani Group. The group comprises of ten publicly traded companies, operating in a range of businesses including ports, airports, power generation and transmission, and green energy. With headquarters based in Ahmedabad, India, the companies had revenues of $11.7 billion in the last fiscal year. Their total market value exceeds $150 billion.
Adani group founder Gautam Adani, 62-years-old, has a net worth of $67 billion, according to Forbes. The group owes its success and leadership position to its core philosophy of ‘Nation Building’ driven by ‘Growth with Goodness’, according to its LinkedIn profile.
Last November, U.S. authorities indicted Adani and his nephew, Sagar Adani, on suspicion of paying bribes to secure power supply contracts and misleading U.S. investors during fund-raising in the United States, according to Reuters.
Adani Group has denied the accusations and vowed to fight them.
Importing LPG, which contributed 1.5% of total revenue last fiscal year, is a small but growing part of Adani group’s business,
The location and journeys of LPG and other tankers can be quickly identified by TankerTrackers.com “in satellite imagery.” Based in Stockholm, Sweden, the startup has indexed more than 9,000 ships, including more than 3,300 large tankers. It keeps a close eye on shipments traffic to and from Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, and Syria.
“Our research provides oil traders, journalists, scholars, enthusiasts and many more with a simple and digestible bird's eye view of what's going on in the world of oil,” according to the company’s website. Using daily satellite imagery, shoreside photography, and real-time AIS data, the online service provides an analysis of ongoing events, maritime export reports, inventory/production forecasts, and satellite visuals wherever clandestine activity is taking place.
In 2018, Samir Madani co-founded TankerTrackers.com with Lisa Ward and Breki Tomasson. Madani and Ward started tracking tankers as a hobby. They were co-creators of #OTTT, The Organization of Oil Trading Tweeters.
TankerTrackers.com does not list any professional or educational information about the founders. Such information is also not listed on either Madani’s LinkedIn profiles.
Tomasson is TankerTrackers’ Chief Data Scientist and Software Developer. According to his LinkedIn profile, earlier he co-founded CSICON a podcasting network, based in Stockholm, that aired "geek culture"-themed podcasts, 2011-2019. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at Enghouse Networks, Stockholm, including as a technical documentation manager and integration engineer. Tomasson earned a BA in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Uppsala University, Sweden.
Earlier, Lisa Ward spent more than six years working in finance and banking, including in operations, customer relations, project management, and accounts.
Prior to founding TankerTrackers.com, Madani spent twenty years working in the technology field. One of his roles was director of sales and marketing at Dovado, a Swedish information technology services startup.
On LinkedIn, Madani lists his skills as tweeting, mouse-clicking, and typing; and typing as his industry knowledge. According to media reports, he was born in Kuwait and spent the first twelve years of his life in the Middle East and North Africa.
Now living in Stockholm, Madani is married to a Swede and they have four children. In a 2018 interview, he told outsidethebox.com that he loves “the struggle of being a grassroots startup…” Also, that he appreciates what he, as “a foreign-born Swede can achieve in this land of opportunity.”
LPG imports, which account for 1.5% of Adani Group’s revenues, is a growing part of the group’s business.
Last November, U.S. authorities indicted Adani and his nephew, Sagar Adani, on suspicion of paying bribes to secure power supply contracts and misleading U.S. investors during fund-raising in the United States, according to Reuters.
Adani Group has denied the accusations and vowed to fight them.
“Over the weekend, a Russian tanker laden with nearly 700K barrels of oil had to return to Russia after spending nearly 4.5 months out at sea,” notes a TankerTrackers LinkedIn post last week. “She was unable to deliver because both the US and EU had slapped her with sanctions shortly after departing in January for India.”
Madani states on his LinkedIn profile, that “I track the dark fleet of oil tankers for our clients in insurance, finance, government, law enforcement, defense, oil, shipping, commodity traders and news.”