NextFin News - A top Washington lobbying and communications firm advised senior US officials to relax sanctions on Iran and Russia as oil prices surged past $100 a barrel in March 2026 - while simultaneously representing companies that Western authorities say are controlled by two of the world's most scrutinized sanctioned oil traders. The episode, and the firm's forceful public denial, lays bare a structural gap in American influence-peddling rules: strategic advisory work can shape sanctions policy from inside the Beltway while remaining almost entirely invisible to regulators and the public.
The Advice, the Waivers, and the Clients
In early March, as the war in Iran sent oil prices soaring above $100 per barrel, executives at a Washington-based firm called Qorvis made an unusual suggestion to senior US officials, according to people familiar with the matter: the Trump administration should relax some sanctions on Iran and Russia to help stabilize the market.
Within days, the Treasury Department issued short-term waivers allowing the sale and offloading of Iranian and Russian oil stranded on tankers at sea. Critics decried the decision for giving secretive, sanctions-busting shippers - the so-called dark fleet that props up Tehran and Moscow - a temporary pass to profit, even as some Asian nations applauded the relief.
The degree to which Qorvis's advice influenced the waivers is unclear. They lasted until early July amid a series of unproductive peace talks that were later followed by threats of new secondary sanctions. Yet over the past year, Qorvis represented Singapore-based Wellbred Capital Pte Ltd. and Dubai-based 2Rivers Group - companies Western officials say are controlled by two of the biggest tycoons in the sanctioned oil trade.
Qorvis has made no secret of its work for those entities. But Qorvis chairman Samantha Sault denied having any working relationships with the sanctioned oil kingpins who, according to government authorities, control them.
"We do not take sanctioned money," Sault wrote in one of the posts on Qorvis's website.
In interviews, more than a dozen people familiar with the company's work - including current and former employees - described deeper relationships between the firm and the two sanctioned oil tycoons. Qorvis, which Sault described as "primarily a communications and strategy firm," has provided a range of services for Iranian tycoon Hossein Shamkhani and Azerbaijani mogul Etibar Eyyub, according to several of the people with direct knowledge of the matter. That included efforts to shape, anticipate and respond to White House policy, law enforcement actions and sensitive diplomatic talks, the people said. They asked not to be named, citing concerns about legal risks or professional retaliation for disclosing confidential information.
The Two Tycoons Behind the Corporate Veil
At the center of the story are two men whose names rarely surface in polite Washington company but whose tankers move a meaningful share of the world's sanctioned crude.
Hossein Shamkhani is the son of Ali Shamkhani, a top adviser to Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. US authorities first sanctioned him in July 2025 in what the Treasury Department called its largest single action since the Trump administration revived its maximum-pressure campaign against Tehran. In August 2026, the Treasury sanctioned Singapore-based Wellbred Capital and its trading arms in the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland, citing links to Shamkhani. "Shamkhani built Wellbred as a company outside the network's Iranian business, though Shamkhani is ultimately responsible for Wellbred's operations," the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control said.
Etibar Eyyub, an Azerbaijani who rose through Moscow trading circles, is the founder of the Coral Energy network, later renamed 2Rivers Group. The European Union sanctioned him in December 2025, writing that he "founded and runs a network of companies including Coral Energy (later 2Rivers Group)," a network that "controls and utilizes a large proportion of the vessels in Russia's so-called 'shadow fleet.'" The United Kingdom sanctioned him earlier that year.
Both men deny wrongdoing. Shamkhani has previously denied owning any oil firm and said he operates only in countries that aren't under sanctions. Eyyub has previously called the sanctions against him "baseless and unlawful." 2Rivers said in a July email that "Mr. Etibar Eyyub is not affiliated with 2Rivers and has not been since early 2022."
A Firm Built to Survive Controversy
Qorvis is not a fly-by-night operation. Founded in August 2000 through the merger of three smaller agencies, it landed its breakthrough assignment just weeks after the September 11 attacks: representing Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, as the kingdom faced some of the most toxic anti-American sentiment in its history. The firm has represented Riyadh continuously ever since, surviving an FBI search of its offices in December 2004 - part of a criminal investigation into whether a pro-Saudi radio-ad campaign broke federal law by not disclosing funds from the Saudi government. No charges were ever filed.
That longevity is the point. Qorvis's value proposition is not access to one administration; it is survivability across administrations. At its heart is a husband-and-wife team. Chief Executive Officer Matt Lauer got his start in North Carolina politics before joining the State Department's US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy; he joined Qorvis in 2004 and went on to found the firm's Geopolitical Solutions division, which represented numerous foreign sovereign countries and corporations. Sault, a former journalist with experience in the international fashion industry, joined in 2022 and now serves as chairman. They first met in 2007 at a party with then-Vice President Dick Cheney on the rooftop of the Hay-Adams Hotel, overlooking the White House. They married in 2016.
The firm's own leadership description of itself matters here. Sault described Qorvis as "primarily a communications and strategy firm" - a framing that is not incidental. Under US law, the disclosure obligations that attach to registered lobbyists turn on direct lobbying contacts and specific spending thresholds. A firm that sells strategy, messaging, and anticipation of policy moves can argue it is doing something adjacent to lobbying without triggering the same paperwork.
The Regulatory Blind Spot
This is the mechanism the Qorvis episode exposes. The US influence industry is governed by two overlapping regimes: the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which requires registration and quarterly reporting of lobbying activity, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires disclosure of work done at the direction or control of foreign principals. Both were written for a world in which influence was exercised through direct contacts with members of Congress and their staffs.
Neither regime captures the bulk of what a modern "communications and strategy" firm actually sells. Shaping how policymakers think about a problem, anticipating enforcement actions before they land, preparing responses to sensitive diplomatic talks - these are the services that people familiar with Qorvis's work say it provided to the sanctioned tycoons' orbit. None of it requires a lobbying contact. None of it appears on a quarterly lobbying report. And if the client is a corporate entity rather than a foreign government, foreign-agent registration may not attach at all.
The result is a disclosure system that is rigorous about the front door and silent about the side entrance. A firm can host the officials, answer the calls, and shape the framing while its filings show little or nothing.
The Market Consequence
The stakes were not abstract. When Qorvis executives made their March suggestion, oil prices had been above $100 per barrel for much of the preceding two weeks as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping and attacked tankers. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time that the Iranian waiver, issued March 20, allowed some 140 million barrels to reach global markets, and that a similar step on Russian oil had added around 130 million barrels to global supplies. He said the releases would help keep prices down for the next 10 to 14 days, offsetting a deficit of 10 million to 14 million barrels per day caused by the Hormuz closure.
In other words, the policy Qorvis advocated - and the administration adopted - moved roughly 270 million barrels of sanctioned Iranian and Russian crude into the global supply. The beneficiaries of that decision included the very traders whose access to Washington the firm was allegedly cultivating. Whether Qorvis's advice caused the waivers or merely anticipated them, the alignment of interests is the story.
WTI crude spot prices illustrate the pressure the administration was under: the benchmark traded at $66.96 on February 27, 2026, the day before the war began, then peaked at $114.58 on April 7, 2026, before falling back to $69.60 on July 6 and settling at $86.48 on August 18. The waivers were a genuine attempt to relieve a genuine supply shock. That is precisely what makes the episode uncomfortable rather than simply scandalous.
The Second-Order Problem
The first-order reading is straightforward: a lobbying firm represented sanctioned-adjacent clients and pushed for sanctions relief. The second-order question is why this keeps happening, and why the obvious fix - close the disclosure gap - has not happened.
Is this a cyclical lapse or a structural one? The distinction matters, because it determines whether the fix is a prosecution or a rewrite of the rules. A cyclical failure would be a single firm cutting corners, correctable through enforcement and deterrence. The evidence here points the other way. The behavior is not a deviation from the influence market's norms; it is an adaptation to them. Clients who need Washington access but cannot survive disclosure have migrated, en masse, to services the disclosure regimes do not cover. Firms that want their business have followed. That is a regime characteristic, not an episode - and it will not revert on its own.
The answer lies in the structure of the influence market itself. After the September 11 attacks, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the most controversial clients in Washington did not stop buying influence. They stopped buying lobbying. They bought strategy, communications, market intelligence, and compliance advisory - services that sit outside the disclosure regimes and carry less reputational risk for the firms that sell them. Qorvis is not an outlier in this model; it is a pioneer. Its 25-year survival as the representative of some of the world's most controversial governments and companies is the business case for the model.
The implication for markets is that sanctions policy - one of the most powerful tools in the US economic arsenal - is being shaped in part by actors whose incentives are structurally aligned with the entities the sanctions are meant to constrain. That does not mean every waiver is corrupt. It means the system has no reliable way to tell the difference.
The Counter-Argument, and What Would Change the Picture
The strongest counter-argument is Qorvis's own. The firm says it never worked for Shamkhani or Eyyub directly; that representing Wellbred and 2Rivers as corporate entities is lawful; that engaging with the administration on market stability is routine and, in Sault's words, "frequently solicited by members of the administration on mechanisms to maintain market stability"; and that the March waivers were driven by a genuine 10-million-to-14-million-barrel-per-day supply deficit, not by any client's lobbying. Qorvis has mounted an aggressive public defense, publishing the journalists' questions and the chairman's responses on its own website and accusing the reporting of resting on misinformation. On the record, that defense holds. The degree of Qorvis's influence on the waivers is, by the reporting's own account, unclear.
But the defense does not address the structural point. Even if Qorvis broke no law, the episode demonstrates that a firm can represent entities controlled by sanctioned individuals, engage senior officials on the exact policy those entities care about, and leave no disclosure trail that would allow a regulator - or a citizen - to connect the dots. That is a feature of the rules, not a bug in one firm's compliance program.
The specific signal that would falsify the structural-blind-spot thesis is concrete: if Qorvis's complete Foreign Agents Registration Act and Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, internal time records, and communications logs showed no work for Shamkhani or Eyyub and no lobbying contacts tied to the March waivers, the "hidden ties" narrative would lose its footing. Conversely, the thesis would be strengthened if the Justice Department opened a formal investigation into the firm's disclosures - a step the reporting suggests is a live possibility but that had not been announced as of publication. Treasury officials, the White House, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
What Comes Next: Three Scenarios
Base case: no formal enforcement action. Qorvis's denials stand; the firm continues operating under the current disclosure regime; the episode becomes a case study in advocacy for reform rather than a prosecution. This is the most likely outcome, given that the alleged conduct sits in the gap between the letter of the disclosure rules and their intent.
Upside for transparency: Congress or the Treasury tightens the definition of reportable activity to include strategic advisory work for sanctioned-adjacent entities, closing the side entrance. That would raise compliance costs across the influence industry and could push some controversial clients toward less scrupulous operators - a real trade-off, not a pure win. Reform of this kind moves slowly; the last major push to close foreign-agent loopholes followed the Manafort-era disclosures of the late 2010s, and much of that momentum has since faded.
Downside: the model spreads. More firms discover that "communications and strategy" is a defensible description of influence work that never touches a lobbying form, and the gap widens as sanctions policy becomes more central to US statecraft. In a world where economic statecraft is conducted as much through Treasury designations as through diplomacy, the demand for advisory work that anticipates those designations will only grow.
Across time horizons, the picture splits. In the short term, the story is a reputational problem for Qorvis and a talking point for transparency advocates. Over the medium term, the question is whether the 2026 waivers become a reference point in future sanctions debates - a precedent that relief is available to traders with the right Washington representation. Over the long term, the structural issue dominates: a disclosure architecture built for a version of influence that no longer exists, and a market that has learned to sell the real thing under a different name.
The waivers moved 270 million barrels of oil. The rules moved nothing.
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