Christopher Eppinger managed to earn $250 million trading Russian oil in just 3 years. He was born in Germany in 1994. Since childhood, he has been “fascinated“ by oil tycoon John Ross Ewing, a character in the American TV series “Dallas“, writes FT.
After high school, he enrolled at the University of Hamburg, where he studied business. After completing his first year, he was offered an internship at the national oil and gas company of Kazakhstan, KazMunayGas. There he met Ilyas Tasmagambetov, the nephew of “one of the most influential“ politicians in the country.
After his internship in Kazakhstan, Eppinger returned to Germany and started working at a small company SET Select Energy. Its founder, Ture von Waal, gave the young man $1 million to run and sent him back to Kazakhstan to open a crude oil refining business there. At the time, Eppinger was 23 years old.
In Kazakhstan, Tasmagambetov was running an oil refinery at the same time that needed cash. Eppinger began working with him: “We bypassed all the local crude oil suppliers... I bought it in cash directly from the oil fields.“ The profit was divided between Select and Tasmagambetov's refinery.
Two years later, Eppinger founded his own oil refining company in Hamburg. He raised nearly $900,000 in capital and invested $200,000 of his own savings. He sent the entire amount to his Kazakh partners to develop the business, but they soon disappeared along with the money.
By the summer of 2021, Eppinger found himself in a difficult situation. An investor in a failed Kazakh project accused him of fraud, and the Hamburg trader’s reputation was seriously damaged. He was looking for a new start. Eventually, he found work with a trading company in Dubai. One of its clients was an oil refinery in the UAE port city of Fujairah, owned by the German company Uniper.
The refinery processes crude oil from Africa and low-sulfur fuel from Russia into marine fuel. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the refinery stopped buying Russian crude oil and looked for new suppliers. Eppinger, who had established a close relationship with the refinery’s director Lars Liebig at the time, saw this as an opportunity.
He himself began looking for oil suppliers. After several unsuccessful attempts, an acquaintance recommended that Eppinger contact the oil trader Mercantile & Maritime Group (M&M). Its founder, Murtaza Lakhani, has been involved in “complex oil schemes” for several decades. For example, according to Bloomberg, after 2022 he created a network of companies for Rosneft to avoid sanctions.
In May 2022, M&M shipped 60,000 tons of Russian fuel oil to CE Energy, a company registered by Eppinger. The ultimate buyer of the fuel oil was supposed to be the Uniper refinery. “I made my first $1 million,” Eppinger says.
After his initial success, the young trader began looking for new suppliers and agreed to buy 98,000 tons of fuel oil from Kazakhstan. Uniper knew that the oil from the landlocked country would be loaded onto a ship in a Russian port, but once the cargo was at sea, it refused to accept it. From then on, Eppinger no longer supplied fuel directly to the refinery, but became an intermediary, selling the fuel oil to Gulf Petrol Supplies, which in turn supplied it to Uniper.
Through M&M, he also became acquainted with Tejarinaft. It used a scheme to “blend” crude oil through the UAE's oil storage system. The fuel oil originally came from Russia, but after passing through storage tanks at the port of Fujairah, Eppinger received a certificate stating that the shipment had been “blended in the UAE”. That was enough for lawyers and contractors, the FT explains.
From 2022 to 2025, Eppinger’s company, CE Energy, shipped 3.3 million tons of oil and oil products to the global market worth approximately $2 billion. Its customers include Nigeria, the Bahamas, Spain, China, Malaysia and other countries. Eppinger himself has earned about $250 million and now lives in a villa for 14 million euros in France. He admits that he once envied older traders who had survived “serious upheavals” such as the collapse of the USSR and the resulting trading opportunities. Now he is no longer envious.
However, in February 2025, CE Energy stopped trading in Russian oil due to “political risks”. And Eppinger's relationship with his M&M's partner Murtaza Lakhani has soured - "partly because of the money," the trader admitted.