On 1 October, with no announcement, VSMPO-AVISMA, the Russian titanium producer that supplies both the Kremlin’s military industry and much of the world’s aerospace sector, handed control of its British subsidiary to a company almost nobody has heard of.
Filings lodged at Companies House on 6 October record that the Russian parent ceased to be the controlling party of VSMPO Tirus Limited, its sales and distribution arm in Redditch, Worcestershire, on 1 October 2026. On the same day, control passed to Quri Investment Limited, a private company registered in Hong Kong eight weeks earlier. VSMPO-AVISMA had held at least 75 per cent of the shares and voting rights, together with the right to appoint the board, since at least 2016.
Quri barely exists. The Hong Kong register shows a company incorporated on 6 August 2026 with issued share capital of HK$10,000, about a thousand pounds. The register lists no website, telephone number or trading address. Its registered office is the Cheung Sha Wan office of Native Group Limited, a licensed corporate-services firm that incorporates companies and supplies registered addresses, and which is also Quri’s company secretary. What, if anything, Quri paid is undisclosed.
The register records one shareholder and one director, and they are the same man: Acyr Jardim Coelho Neto, identified by a Brazilian passport or identity number. The address he gives is Suite 207 of the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Muscat, Oman. Nothing we have found in the public record connects him to the titanium trade, to VSMPO-AVISMA or to Hong Kong. On the face of the register, a Brazilian with a hotel-room address in the Gulf now controls the British distributor of Russia’s most strategically important metal.
Sanctions regimes are built on nationality and territory. Britain’s rules reach conduct abroad only where it is by a British national or a British company. The European Union’s reach stops, in the same way, at EU nationals, EU companies and business done within the Union. Brazil has imposed no sanctions on Russia at all: its law provides for asset freezes only in execution of United Nations Security Council resolutions, and its government has repeatedly rejected what it calls unilateral sanctions. Hong Kong has said the same of itself: it does not have the legal authority to implement unilateral sanctions and will not do so. Every link in Quri’s chain of ownership, a Hong Kong company, a Brazilian owner and an address in Oman, sits outside Britain, the European Union, Switzerland and the United States. The British company, its banks and its customers remain bound by British law. What changes is the answer to the question of who owns it.
A well-timed exit
The timing is hard to ignore. The transfer took effect 13 days after President Donald Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act into law on 18 September, the most sweeping Russia sanctions package Washington has passed since the invasion of Ukraine.
Two weeks after the transfer, on 16 October, the president waived the Act’s tariffs and its new sanctions by executive order, leaving the earlier executive-order sanctions in place and certifying to Congress that this was in the national interest.
There was a second deadline. VSMPO-AVISMA has been on the US Commerce Department’s Entity List since September 2023. A Commerce rule adopted in September 2025 extends Entity List restrictions automatically to any company at least half-owned by a listed party, so that supplying it with American goods or technology needs a licence and compliance screening flags it. Washington suspended that rule for a year on 10 November 2025 and, unless it publishes an extension, the rule comes back into force on 10 November 2026. Until 1 October, VSMPO Tirus Limited was wholly owned by a listed party. It no longer is.
The company behind the company
VSMPO-AVISMA is the world’s leading titanium producer. The Entity List entry describes it as ‘directly involved in producing and manufacturing titanium and metal products for the Russian military and security services’. Yet it has never been placed on the Treasury’s list of specially designated nationals, and neither Britain nor the EU has designated it. Canada has, since February 2024. In 2022 the European Union blocked a proposal to sanction it after Airbus had warned that titanium sanctions would ‘massively damage the entire aerospace industry across Europe’.
The company is majority-owned by the Russian businessman Mikhail Shelkov through Industrial Investments LLC. Shelkov is sanctioned in Ukraine and Canada. The state conglomerate Rostec holds a blocking stake. According to the shareholding figures that VSMPO-AVISMA’s own German subsidiary put before a Swiss court this year, Industrial Investments holds 64.98 per cent and a Rostec vehicle, RT-Business Development, holds 25.000056 per cent, a blocking minority, as the subsidiary itself accepted. Rostec’s chief executive, Sergei Chemezov, a former KGB colleague of Vladimir Putin, is sanctioned in Switzerland, the EU, the UK, Canada and the US.
That link is not academic. In July, the Cantonal Court of Fribourg in Switzerland dismissed an appeal by VSMPO-AVISMA’s wholly owned German subsidiary, VSMPO TiRus GmbH, which had tried to freeze a metals trader’s Swiss bank accounts. The court held that the subsidiary bore the burden of proving that Chemezov did not exercise a controlling influence over it, and that it had failed to do so. It concluded that putting assets at the subsidiary’s disposal would be, in the court’s words as translated, ‘a prohibited indirect provision of assets in favour of an undertaking sanctioned within the meaning of Article 15(2)’ of the Swiss sanctions ordinance. The same question is before other tribunals, and further rulings are expected.
VSMPO-AVISMA has since called an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting scheduled for 20 November 2026 at Verkhnyaya Salda, Russia. The agenda is to end the current board’s term early and elect a new board. VSMPO published the notice on 22 September; its board had resolved to call the meeting on 18 September, and the shareholder record date was 30 September, the day before the British transfer took effect.
The company has not said why. The obvious reading is that the board is being reshaped with the Swiss ruling in mind, and the obvious candidate for removal is Chemezov. Seen in that light, the transfer of the British company nine days after the notice looks less like a coincidence and more like part of the same exercise: the sanctioned link removed at the top of the group, and the Russian name removed at the bottom.
Quietly rearranging the furniture
The ownership change is the latest step in a steady rearrangement at the British company. Its Russian directors have gone. Oleg Leder, a director since 2008, stepped down in January 2022, a month before the invasion of Ukraine. His replacement, Dmitry Masodi, lasted less than six months and left in July 2022. No Russian national has sat on the board since. Since September 2022 the board has included Sandra Vienne, a Swiss director based in Lausanne, the city where VSMPO-AVISMA’s Swiss distributor, Tirus International SA, is located, and of which she is also a director. Colin Whitehouse, a director since 2016, stepped down at the end of 2025 and was replaced on 1 January by Kris Kearney. A month on, the register still shows the same two directors and nobody from the buyer’s side.
What the company told its auditors
Its financial statements for 2025, approved by the board on 26 March 2026 and delivered to Companies House on 30 September, the day before the transfer took effect, and registered on 7 October, the day after the ownership filings, still name Shelkov’s Industrial Investments as the ultimate parent and Shelkov himself as ‘the ultimate controlling party’. They record that in January 2026 the Russian parent decided to consult on merging the British company with its German sister, VSMPO Tirus GmbH.
In the going concern note, the directors acknowledge ‘an inherent risk of further sanctions against Russian owned entities registered in the UK which would impact the company’s ability to trade in certain circumstances’. The auditors drew attention to that risk as a material uncertainty that ‘may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern’. Six months later the Russian owner was gone from the register.
The British company turned over $72.4 million in 2025, down from $93.4 million, and had net assets of $27.1 million. It bought $65.3 million of goods from Tirus International last year, and its accounts describe the parent as ‘its main trade creditor and sole supplier of goods for resale’. Whoever holds the shares, the business cannot trade without VSMPO. A company with HK$10,000 of capital and a sole director with a sole address, has, on paper acquired a business with $27 million of net assets.
Why Hong Kong?
In October 2022 the Hong Kong government said that it ‘does not implement, nor does it have the legal authority to take action on unilateral sanctions’ imposed by other jurisdictions, and that it enforces only those imposed by the UN Security Council, a position it restated in 2024. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Washington-based research group, describes the city as ‘the single largest global transshipment node for high-priority Western technology feeding Russia’s war in Ukraine’. Hong Kong requires every company to keep a register of the people who really control it, but that register is open to law enforcement officers, not to the public.
None of this establishes what Quri is or who stands behind it. But it explains why the move invites questions.
The questions
Does VSMPO-AVISMA, or anyone connected to its shareholders, still own VSMPO Tirus through Quri? If so, nothing has changed except visibility: a Russian company listed by Washington for supplying the Russian military would continue to sell into Britain, but behind a Hong Kong name.
If not, then somebody has bought a distributor of Russian titanium that is still branded VSMPO-AVISMA, and Britain’s aerospace and engineering customers, many with defence contracts, deserve to know who that is and where the money came from.
A foreign company can be registered as the controller of a British company only if it is itself subject to equivalent disclosure rules, in practice a British company or a listed one. A Hong Kong private company is neither, so the law requires the British company to look through it and register the individual who controls it. VSMPO Tirus Limited has instead registered Quri, as for ten years it registered VSMPO-AVISMA, a Moscow-listed company that was no longer eligible. On the face of the Hong Kong register, the individual behind Quri is Mr Coelho Neto; if someone else in fact controls Quri, that person must be named. The filing that removed VSMPO-AVISMA is itself a statement to the Registrar that the Russian company no longer controls Tirus UK, directly or through Quri. A filing that is misleading in a material particular is an offence.
There are questions for the British government too. Was the transfer reviewed by the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation? Was it notified under the National Security and Investment Act, which requires advance clearance of acquisitions in sensitive sectors, among them the supply of certified advanced materials such as aerospace titanium alloys? If the acquisition needed clearance and did not get it, the Act says it ‘is void’. And is Companies House content to show a Hong Kong shell, rather than a named individual, as the controller of a British company trading in aerospace titanium?
And there is the broader question. Washington has passed the toughest Russia sanctions law in years, then paused it. Brussels has spent four years declining to act. In that space, Russia’s most strategically important metals producer appears to have quietly moved its British business behind a company registered in Hong Kong, owned by a Brazilian with an address in a Muscat hotel.