Early one morning late last August, the container ship Cool Emerald eased into the port of St. Petersburg, Russia, to find customs and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents waiting on shore.
The Russian authorities had allegedly been tipped off by colleagues abroad to the possibility that drugs were concealed in the cargo of bananas from Ecuador. Sure enough, they said they found a few thousand bricks of tightly packed white powder: About 1.5 metric tons of cocaine, testers allegedly found, with a street value of some 20 billion rubles ($257 million).
For Russian customs, it was a record haul. For Cool Carriers, the Cyprus-based commercial operator of Cool Emerald, it was one of several incidents in recent years in which one of the dozens of vessels in its fleet has allegedly been used to transport drugs.
Among them: In October 2023, British authorities said they discovered 137 kilograms of cocaine attached to the hull of the Cool Express; in spring 2024, St. Petersburg customs said they found 60 kilograms of cocaine on the same vessel; that August, more than 575 kilograms of cocaine were allegedly dumped from the Cool Express off Denmark.
Cool Carriers “has no involvement in drug trafficking and strongly condemns drug usage and distribution,” a company representative said in an e-mailed response to questions from Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit. “It is not under investigation in any jurisdiction and has not been approached by the investigating authorities.”
Cool Carriers is “the world’s largest operator of refrigerator vessels,” also known as reefer vessels, the representative said, adding that it ships perishable goods to destinations on multiple continents and that St. Petersburg “is not a key destination among our port calls.”
Ties To Putin
The company’s CEO and owner is Mikhail Ganyushin, who lives in Cyprus and was formerly involved in the shipping industry in St. Petersburg.
One of the port agents for Cool Carriers in St. Petersburg is a company called Baltic Shipping, which was founded in 1999. According to a Russian corporate registry, its original shareholders were Ganyushin and Vladimir Borisenko. Ganyushin left Baltic Shipping in 2023 and it is now fully owned by Borisenko, 63 -- a graduate of the same St. Petersburg maritime academy that Ganyushin, 53, graduated from.
An investigation by Systema found that both Ganyushin and Borisenko have ties to associates and allies of Putin from St. Petersburg, where the longtime president first tasted power as a deputy mayor and head of the city’s external economic relations committee in the early 1990s.
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Teflon Putin? Over 20 Years In Power, Scandals Don't Seem To Stick To The Russian PresidentThose ties include a link between Borisenko and businessman Oleg Rudnov, an old friend and associate of Putin’s who died in 2015. In 2004, Borisenko and Rudnov, were among six charter members of an owners’ association at a residential real estate development outside St. Petersburg, HappyJarvi.
Borisenko and Ganyushin may be connected to another longtime Putin acquaintance, Ilya Klebanov, though MGS-Terminal, a facility at the St. Petersburg port that, according to remarks from its director in 2024, handled most of the bananas consumed in Russia as well as many of those shipped on to other countries in the region.
In 2025, Russia imported about 1.4 million metric tons of bananas -- and of that total, about 1.24 million metric tons came in through the port of St. Petersburg.
The MGS-Terminal director, Vladimir Burlev, said in a 2024 media interview that the terminal's main customer was Baltic Shipping, which he said accounts for two-thirds of the bananas delivered to the market, apparently referring to the Russian market.
Mikhail Ganyushin
As of late 2025, Ganyushin and Borisenko were on the board of directors of MGS-Terminal, which was partially owned by the heirs of Dmitry Kozharsky, a St. Petersburg businessman who lived in the same apartment building as several Putin associates. Kozharsky, who died in 2022, was a business partner of Klebanov’s in a fisheries industry firm and reportedly an old friend as well. The Cool Carriers representative said Ganyushin is no longer on the board.
Klebanov headed a St. Petersburg defense industry facility in the 1990s and won praise from Putin when the future president was deputy mayor. He was a deputy prime minister when Putin took office as president in 2000, and Putin appointed him to head a commission established to deal with Kursk disaster after the nuclear submarine sank that August. Now 75, Klebanov left the cabinet in 2003 and served as presidential envoy to Russia’s Northwestern Federal District, which includes St. Petersburg, until 2011.
Vladimir Borisenko, Honorary Consul of South Africa in St. Petersburg
The Cool Carriers representative said that “MGS Terminal, which specializes in discharge and storage of refrigerated cargo, is used for the discharge of fruit cargo for St Petersburg-bound voyages of Cool Carriers.”
He said that Ganyushin had joined the terminal’s board “as an independent nonexecutive director on a nonpaid basis” in order to “ensure seamless...operation,” but had subsequently resigned, and that Ganyushin and Klebanov “are not acquainted.”
Neither Ganyushin nor Cool Carriers are shareholders of MGS-Terminal, the Cool Carriers representative said. MGS-Terminal did not respond to a request for comment.
Systema also found evidence pointing to possible connections with some of the allies who co-founded Ozero, a dacha cooperative outside St. Petersburg, with Putin in the 1990s, including the brothers Andrei and Sergei Fursenko as well as Yury Kovalchuk, a billionaire banker who remains one of Putin’s closest confidants.
Kovalchuk is believed to be the main owner of Bank Rossiya, and Andrei Fursenko -- a longtime Putin aide and former minister of education and science -- is a former co-owner of the bank. Sergei Fursenko was on the board of directors of Gazprom Neft, the state natural-gas giant’s oil arm, from 2013 to 2019.
Asked by Systema whether Cool Carriers does business with Gazprom Neft or any other state-owned Russian company, the representative said, “Absolutely not.”
Neither Borisenko nor Baltic Shipping responded to requests for comment from Systema. The Cool Carriers representative said that Borisenko has no relation to the company and that while Borisenko and Ganyushin had cooperated in several projects related to the shipping business in the past, they “do not have any joint projects” now.
Drug Trafficking Hub
Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, St. Petersburg became a major hub for drug trafficking, with Colombia’s Cali cartel starting to use its big Baltic Sea port as a transit point for shipments of cocaine to Europe in 1992.
Putin, a longtime former KGB officer, survived a number of corruption allegations and scandals during his 1991-96 stint as a key trade official in St. Petersburg. In one of them, security forces under a fellow KGB alumnus seized more than 1 metric ton of cocaine stashed in corned-beef cans -- but the drugs disappeared and no trial was held in Russia.
For years, banana imports were dominated by Vladimir Kekhman, a fruit tycoon who became known as the “Banana King” and in 2010 denied involvement when 120 kilograms of cocaine were found on a vessel chartered by his company, JFC, at the St. Petersburg port. JFC was declared bankrupt in 2015.
In a 2011 interview with the independent Russian media outlet Dozhd, Kekhman suggested that transporting drugs on vessels shipping bananas was fairly common, but that crews were largely responsible, not the owners of the ships or cargoes.
Vladimir Kekhman, who went from banana magnate to theater executive, outside the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2018.
In his response to questions from Systema, the Cool Carriers representative said the company “does not own or manage any of the vessels reported in the media in relation to drug smuggling.”
Cool Carriers “is the commercial operator of the vessels and has no involvement in their day-to-day operations, he said. “Operational control, including hiring and managing crews, loading and unloading, rests entirely with the third-party owners, decisions in which Cool Carriers plays no role.”
“It is well known that South American cartels are actively working to infiltrate or gain access to commercial ships loading at local ports using them as mules for drug trafficking,” the representative said.
“The gangs are seeking and finding weak spots to penetrate by bribing, threatening, and hurting people involved in the industry, relocating from one jurisdiction and port of embarkation to another to minimize exposure to security.”