"Zeroing" of Russian oil? This big embarrassment in Britain has been exposed!

On November 20, local time, the British "Sunday Times" exposed a matter
that is bound to embarrass the British official.

It turns out that since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the UK has announced that it will gradually get rid of its dependence on Russian oil and will completely ban the import
of Russian oil after December 5 this year.
Not only that, British official statistics also show that in June and July this year, the United Kingdom has achieved "zero"
of Russian oil.

However, the Sunday Times found that the UK was still importing oil from Russia in June and July, and it was only due to a loophole in the official British statistical mechanism that this data was "cleared"
.

In this report, the Sunday Times first said that since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the United Kingdom announced that it would get rid of its dependence on Russian oil as soon as possible, and stipulated that it would ban the import of oil
from Russia after December 5 this year.

Moreover, even if it were "legal" to import Russian oil before December 5, the reputational risks to doing so would be enormous
.

However, the newspaper found that despite the UK's constant support for Ukraine, the UK has actually imported Russian oil
from Russia since March this year, with a total value of about 778 million pounds.
More than £200 million of oil entered the UK under the guise of a third party
.

And it is extremely embarrassing that although the official statistics of the United Kingdom show that the UK's Russian oil imports in June and July this year have been "cleared", in fact, more than 80 million pounds worth of Russian oil arrived in various British ports
in the name of a third party in the name of a third party.

The Sunday Times analyzed that on the one hand, some cargo ships will "wash" oil from Russia into oil from other places by conducting "ship-to-ship transfers" in other countries or on the high
seas.

On the other hand, there are also problems
with the way British officials register imports.

The newspaper further explained that the problem was the way the Office for National Statistics registered imports
.
Although HMRC registers both the origin and origin of imported products, the Office for National Statistics will only consider the origin of the product to be the country of
origin when checking and registering this information.

For example, if a German company sells a batch of Chinese-made products to the UK, the products become from Germany according to the registration method of the Office for National Statistics
.

As a result, a lot of oil originally produced in Russia was registered by the British Office for National Statistics as coming from other countries because of this statistical method
.
For example, in June and July of this year, oil from Russia was registered as coming from Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Latvia, as well as France, Germany and other countries
.

At present, British politicians have raised this issue in Parliament, asking the government to close this "loophole" so that sanctions against Russia will not be exploited because of such problems
.

However, some experts believe that there is already a fairly mature international method of circumventing the oil embargo and sanctions, and it is unrealistic
to completely ban Russian oil from entering the UK.