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 PutinThe 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.