CENTAURI SERVICES LLC GALAXY
A 7 ships shadow fleet cluster
1) What I could establish about Centauri Services LLC
In publicly accessible maritime-intelligence and sanctions-tracking sources, Centauri Services LLC appears as the registered owner of a seven-vessel tanker fleet. MagicPort lists the company as UAE-based, with 7 vessels, a combined 491,586 dwt, and all ships in the 16–25 year age band.
At the same time, several vessel records in Ukraine’s War & Sanctions database identify it as “Centauri Services LLC (0110029 / Marshall Islands)”, sometimes with a date indicating when that ownership record became active for a given ship, suggesting a company with a Marshall Islands corporate identity but an operational footprint routed through Dubai.
The clearest public address I found for Centauri is not a standalone office, but a care-of address tied directly to Lumen Ship Management - FZCO: Centauri Services LLC, c/o Lumen Ship Management - FZCO, Unit 405, 4th Floor, Jumeirah Business Center 5, Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Lumen’s own public maritime listings place it at that same JLT address, and MagicPort’s company pages show the same overlap, with Lumen’s office serving as Centauri’s contact location. For Lumen itself, I also found a public contact trail in a maritime directory snippet listing email: info-lumenship@protonmail.com, phone: +971 54 508 6886, and IMO company number: 0019646.
2) A Greek Shipping Executive in the Contact Chain Behind Centauri and Lumen
The phone number +971 54 508 6886. Public maritime directory records associate it with Lumen Ship Management - FZCO, alongside the company’s Dubai address and ProtonMail contact. What makes it notable is that the same number appears to be linked through public digital traces to Vasileios “Vassilis” Papafaklis, a Greek maritime professional whose LinkedIn profile presents him as a Singapore-based shipping executive working in oil transport. On its own, that does not prove that Papafaklis owns or controls Lumen or Centauri. But in a network where public company information is unusually thin, a shared contact point matters.
That alone would already be interesting. But the stronger link is operational:
Centauri looks like the ownership shell. Lumen looks like the managing company.
3) What the pattern looks like from an OSINT perspective
The fleet is highly consistent in age: all seven tankers were built between 2006 and 2009. It is also highly consistent in flagging behavior, cycling through registries such as Sierra Leone, Gabon, Cameroon, Sao Tome and Principe, Liberia, Marshall Islands, and Russia.
The sanctions exposure is uneven, but the behavioral pattern is not. The public records I reviewed describe CETUS, URIEL, ADITYA, DENVER, and KHALASI/MAGNOLIYA as involved in transporting Russian crude or petroleum products, often with AIS shutdowns, calls at russian ports.
Even the smaller ships are telling. MARKAB and NEMBUS are not just random small coastal tankers. The War & Sanctions entries describe them as involved in Russian oil-product export activity, bunkering, and, in NEMBUS’s case, calls linked to the occupied territory of Crimea and deceptive AIS behavior.
4) Why are some of these ships still not sanctioned?
If this network is visible in open sources, why are MARKAB and NEMBUS apparently still outside the sanctions perimeter I reviewed, while the larger ships are already listed by combinations of the EU, UK, Switzerland, Ukraine, Canada, Australia, and in one case New Zealand?
The larger vessels — CETUS, DENVER, URIEL, ADITYA, MAGNOLIYA/KHALASI — are easier to document as export workhorses moving Russian-origin oil on long routes to third countries. Their case files are richer: more voyages, more port calls, more AIS anomalies, and clearer links to known shadow-fleet management chains.
By contrast, MARKAB and NEMBUS are smaller support-style tankers operating. That does not make them irrelevant. It may make them easier to miss. Small tankers used for bunkering, feeder work, or localized support can be essential to a sanctions-evasion ecosystem while drawing less attention than a 105,000 dwt crude carrier crossing from Primorsk toward Port Said.
Absence from a sanctions list is not the same thing as absence from the network.
sources :
1. MagicPort – Centauri Services LLC
https://magicport.ai/owners-managers/united-arab-emirates/centauri-services-llc
2. MagicPort – Lumen Ship Management - FZCO
https://magicport.ai/owners-managers/united-arab-emirates/lumen-ship-management-fzco
3. MagicPort – CETUS vessel page
https://magicport.ai/vessels/tanker/cetus-mmsi-629009032
4. MagicPort – MAGNOLIYA vessel page
https://magicport.ai/vessels/tanker/magnoliya-mmsi-215034000
5. Ukraine War & Sanctions – Shadow Fleet main page
https://war-sanctions.gur.gov.ua/en/transport/shadow-fleet
6. Ukraine War & Sanctions – NEMBUS vessel entry
https://war-sanctions.gur.gov.ua/en/transport/shadow-fleet/933
7. KSE Institute – Sanctions Analytics hub
https://sanctions.kse.ua/en/sanctions-analytics/
8. KSE Institute – Russian Oil Tracker, December 2025
https://sanctions.kse.ua/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ROT_DEC25.pdf
9. Marine Vessel Traffic – NEMBUS owner / manager / ISM data
https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/ship-owner-manager-ism-data/NEMBUS/9334296/626455000
10. VesselFinder – NEMBUS vessel details
https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9334296
11. ShipSpotting – vessel records / class society references
https://www.shipspotting.com/
12. IACS – official members list
https://iacs.org.uk/members/member-list
OPENSANCTIONS
https://www.opensanctions.org/
VASSILIS PAPAFAKLIS LINKEDN PAGE
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasileios-papafaklis-2924b750/