“I do not have any contact with the Russian government,” he said, adding that he did not know how his name or address were being used and did not know Alburton’s work. He said he intended to remove himself as the company’s Canadian representative.
While Mr. Poberezkin’s story couldn’t be independently verified, it was characteristic of Russian efforts to pull in businesspeople — some of whom may be unwitting and who often have a background linked to Russia — to sidestep sanctions, experts said. That Russia-related businesses dared to do it in a major city of a U.S. ally illustrated how unabashed their evasions could be.
A Canada Border Services Agency spokesman said it could not provide details about Alburton’s operations.
Alburton has other international links. In 2019, it shipped thousands of pounds of electrical cables to Russia through Levitus Trading, a company in the British Virgin Islands, according to the analysis of Russian customs data. Levitus was once the sole owner of Olax, a company now owned by Mr. Chichenev at a familiar address: 135 Bonham Strand in Hong Kong.
Reporting was contributed by Adam Satariano, Tiffany May, Alexandra Stevenson and Vjosa Isai.
Methodology
To calculate Russia’s imports of restricted chips, The New York Times analyzed Russian customs data from a company that gathers global trade information from governments worldwide. The company asked not to be named in order to preserve its access to sensitive trade data from Russia and other countries.
The Times verified the customs data through interviews with experts, crosschecks against other data providers and interviews with companies included in the data.
The Times specifically looked at data on electronic goods that fell within an international trade classification denoted by the numbers 8542.3. That category includes chips that the U.S. Commerce Department has designated as sensitive goods. The United States restricted those products from Russia in 2022 after the war in Ukraine began.
The Times analyzed all Russian imports of such goods between July 1, 2021, and Jan. 4, 2024. Each trade record included the name of the importer, the exporter, the brand of chip, its value and its number of units. That information was used to calculate aggregates. Shipment values were calculated based on the exchange rate at the date of trade.
To discern whether any of the exporters had been placed under sanctions by the United States, The Times compared the Russian customs data with U.S. Treasury sanctions designations using information from Open Sanctions, a sanctions data provider.
The Times reviewed hundreds of corporate filings from Hong Kong and Ontario, as well as public records compiled by commercial services, to determine the owners of the shell companies. The Times also reviewed documents from the Panama Papers, a collection of leaked financial documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.