Episode notes
Roughly $4 billion a month. That is what Iran’s sanctioned oil trade with China was worth when it ran normally, according to Charlie Brown, and the revenue goes directly to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Brown, a former U.S. Navy officer who heads the Iran Tanker Tracking Program at United Against a Nuclear Iran, joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso from Singapore to explain how Iranian crude reaches China’s teapot refineries by way of an anchorage 80 nautical miles from Singapore, often relabeled “Malaysian blended crude.”
He calls Malaysia’s Eastern Outer Port Limits “parking on the side of a superhighway.” The location is within Malaysia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), shallow enough to anchor and close enough to Singapore for resupply. Ships go there, he says, “precisely because they won’t be disrupted.” None anchor in Indonesian waters, where Jakarta’s enforcement is stronger across its full maritime zone, having once seized the Iranian-flagged Arman 114.
Malaysian fines run just five figures against cargoes worth $100 million, which Charlie calls a slap on the wrist. This past January, Malaysian authorities detained two false-flagged tankers conducting a transfer off Penang, then released them with a minimal fine, which changed nothing at the Johor anchorage. Malaysia updated its EEZ Act in June 2026 to cover illegal anchoring and unpermitted cargo transfers across its maritime zone, but Brown says nothing has really changed.
Also in this episode: what the U.S. blockade has and has not stopped, why 26 Iranian-flagged tankers sailed within days of the MoU signing, and Brown’s argument that roughly a third of these ships are now stateless and can be seized by any nation on the high seas.
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