Methods and sources.

Counts as of 25 September 2026.

The short version

• Every ship, company and person on the map comes from a government list or a public filing. We did not add anyone from news stories or guesswork.
• Every line on the map has a source you can open: click any dot, and each connection shows the record it came from.
• Lines we inferred ourselves are drawn dotted and labelled "lead". There are 31 of them out of 3,708 lines, and you can switch them off.
• The main finding is also a limit: the front companies that run the ships never appear in US lobbying records. Their parent companies, banks and state owners do. Only 14 records connect the two.

Where the data comes from

How we built it

1. Start with the ships. A ship's name can change with paperwork, but its hull number, issued by the International Maritime Organization (the "IMO number"), stays with it for life. We join every list by that number, so one ship with five names is still one dot.
2. Attach the companies. The lists say who owns, manages or operates each ship. Those become the lines between ships and companies. 177 listed ships have no owner or operator named on any list, so they are not drawn.
3. Choose the lobbying clients. We picked the companies in our story: Russian banks and energy firms such as Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank, Gazprom, Nord Stream 2, Novatek and Arctic LNG 2; Chinese firms on US blacklists such as Huawei, ZTE, SMIC, Hikvision and DJI; and the US semiconductor industry's trade group and Nvidia. We also searched for the shipping companies themselves.
4. Read every report. We pulled all pages of lobbying reports for those names (3,232 reports) and kept the 1,513 whose client really is one of them. Name searches catch look-alikes, such as "ZTEK Corp" for ZTE or turkey farmers for Turkey, so every client is matched against an exact list.
5. Count the money once. Lobbying firms often correct a quarter's report, and the corrected version repeats the same fee. We count each firm, client and quarter once, using the latest version that states an amount. When a firm hires a subcontractor, the subcontractor also reports that money; we show that link but do not add it to the client's total, because it is already inside the main firm's fee. We checked one total by hand: Nord Stream 2 paid its Washington firms $13.87 million from 2016 to 2022. Before this cleanup the same data added up to $18.9 million.
6. Look up sanctions status by record number. For every lobbying client we found its exact entry on the US and UK lists and recorded the entry number. A solid red ring means a government blocked it (froze its assets). A dashed ring means it is restricted: limits on trade, loans or investment, but not a full freeze. Gazprom, for example, is restricted, not blocked.
7. Connect the two sides only with official records. We hand-checked each link between the lobbying side and the fleet against a government source: Treasury's statements of who owns whom, and US list entries that link seven shipping companies to Arctic LNG 2. Each one shows its source when you click it.
8. Merge the VeilTrace team's work. A VeilTrace team member's lobbying study and our layer named many of the same organisations. We matched them by name, checked every match by hand (four look-alikes were kept apart, such as Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2), and kept one dot per organisation. When both had a link between the same pair, we kept ours because it carries the filing number and amount.
9. Record the revolving door. Lobbyists must list the government jobs they held before. We took those words exactly as each lobbyist wrote them, which gives 176 lobbyists with past posts, from former senators to a former counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury.

How sure we are

Every line carries one of three labels.

We describe what records show, in plain words, with the source attached. We do not say anyone broke the law unless a court or government agency has said so. A person who has been charged is "charged", not "convicted".

Who we name, and who we don't

• People are named only when a government list or official release names them, in that role, or when they are lobbyists named in their own public lobbying reports. Six people from the shadow-fleet research have not yet had their official source re-checked; they are marked "(?)".
• Unlisted companies known only from non-official sources are not named. They appear as a description, such as "unlisted India ship manager" (27 of them). This follows the VeilTrace team's rule for the shadow-fleet map.
• Hollow shapes are companies that run listed ships but are on no list themselves (375). That is a fact about the lists, not an accusation.

What the map cannot tell you

• "No connection found" is not "no connection." The map only knows what is written in the records we used. The path finder says so when it finds nothing.
• No lobbying report does not mean no influence. Influence can also run through foreign-agent filings, European lobbying, embassies or governments. We searched 18 ship managers, front companies and oil traders and found zero US lobbying reports for any of them.
• Lobbying fees are approximate. The law lets firms round their income to the nearest $10,000, and totals are what firms reported, not what we audited.
• Only US lobbying. We did not add Europe's lobbying register or trade-association member lists yet.
• Some searches were impossible. The lobbying database ignores the "+" in "En+ Group", so En+ comes only from an earlier, narrower search.
• Bills are filtered. We show the key bills named in our story and any bill named in three or more reports (125 in total), to keep the picture readable.
• "Live" is a moment, not a record. The green pulse means a ship's transponder was seen at the time of the snapshot. Sanctioned tankers often switch transponders off or broadcast false positions, so a ship without the pulse may still be at sea.
• A snapshot. Lists change every week. Everything here reflects the lists and reports as downloaded on 25 September 2026.

Check it yourself

Click any dot on the map: the side panel lists every connection with its date, record number and a source link to the official page or filing. The raw lobbying reports we downloaded are kept with the date and time of each download. The scripts that rebuild the map from those files sit next to it in scripts/.

Graph drawing: force-graph (MIT licence). Fonts: Inter, Schibsted Grotesk, Source Serif 4 and JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font Licence). Sanctions and lobbying records are public government data.