An Italian report into the murky underworld of Libyan oil
The histories of Italy and Libya have long been intertwined: from the time when Libya was a province of the Roman Empire, to Italian colonial rule in the twentieth century, to leadership level politico-business dealings across the Mediterranean in the twenty-first.
Italy’s largest oil company, ENI, has long been the largest foreign operator in Libya. Former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister for much of the 2000s, signed a major friendship treaty in 2008 which led, amongst other things, to significant Libyan investment in Italian banks and other assets. (In 2011, Italy nonetheless provided support for the military campaign which resulted in Gadaffi’s ousting.)
In this piece for Italian investigative journalism outfit IrpiMedia, building on a regular subject in the publication’s reporting, Carlotta Indiano and Fabio Papetti relate the latest twist in a long trans-maritime tale.
It details the arrival of crude oil in the Italian port of Trieste in 2024, ostensibly produced in Libya by the relatively new company Arkenu; but prompting Indiano and Papetti to raise wider questions about smuggling, so-called “shadow fleets” of tankers in the Mediterranean, as well as who is behind Arkenu itself.
Arkenu, the article says, has sold $500 million of Libyan oil over the last two years, and is the first private company in Libya to have been permitted to do so. At the same time, the state National Oil Company (NOC) has been “infiltrated” by armed groups and their interests, the article states, citing a UN expert report from 2024 (the report is available here). In effect, NOC, and the Libyan Central Bank as the recipient of national oil export revenues, are being circumvented.
Who benefits? The article notes the hypothesis that Arkenu itself results from an “accordo triangolare” (a three-sided agreement) to the benefit of the UN-recognised Government of National Unity (which controls the west), the Libyan National Army and General Khalifa Haftar (in the east), and the United Arab Emirates. The 2024 UN expert report stated Saddam Haftar, the son of General Haftar, was in indirect control of Arkenu.
Meanwhile, the eastern Libyan coastal cities of Tobruk and Benghazi in the Haftar domain are said to have become hubs of oil smuggling. Libya produces crude oil, the article notes, but has limited refining capacity, and so needs to import refined products, such as petrol. The domestic price of petrol is subsidised by the Libyan Ministry of Finance. So there’s an incentive to re-export and re-sell these products, siphoning off that subsidy as profit.
But this is where the report gets really murky. Sometimes what is being re-exported may be actually Russian. Example: a ship turns up in Libya carrying Russian oil and transfers its cargo to another to hide its origin. Other times the transshipment could happen off the coast of Malta. (This is a subject IrpiMedia has reported on before).
The ships involved in smuggling from Libya often “spoof” – that is, use technology to hide their true location, a classic technique of so-called “shadow fleets” transporting sanctioned Iranian or Russian oil, and engaged in transshipment.
The EU tends to use the term “shadow fleet” exclusively in reference to Russian oil. But, as this article suggests, the overlapping web of interactions in the Mediterranean – both licit and illicit, legal and illegal – is more complex, with more players involved.
Ultimately, everyone is trying to achieve the same thing: turning a sticky black substance, wherever it’s from, into money and power.
This original source article ‘I misteri di Arkenu, la società petrolifera che unisce i potenti che si contendono la Libia’, was published in Italian by IrpiMedia on 10 December 2025.
It is available here.
IrpiMedia is an independent, non-profit investigative Italian media outlet.
