Weilun Soon, Alex Longley and Anthony Di PaolaJul 7, 2026 – 3.04pmJust a few weeks into the war, one of the Persian Gulf’s top oil producers quietly began sneaking its crude out of the Strait of Hormuz. Before long, the covert project became so successful that the United Arab Emirates was already approaching its pre-war rate of flows through the waterway by the time the US and Iran signed their interim peace deal.The UAE’s aggressive push to get barrels safely out of the strait relied on tactics normally associated with sanctioned countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela: the ships travelled “dark” without their transponders (and often under the cover of literal darkness) before offloading their cargo into other tankers waiting outside the waterway, and then returning to collect more.BloombergSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Fetching latest articles