Expert Blue, 23rd floor
A livestock exporter at Jumeirah Emirates Towers, tied to a Syrian holding group by its own footer and by a one-second gap in a registrar's logs.
17 findings · 2 articles
Findings & articles
Every claim in the investigation, with its confidence rating and the basis for it, and the long-form writing attached to them. Filter the findings by confidence to see what actually holds up.
6Confirmed
10Strong
1Suggestive
0Struck
Articles
Long-form writing, each piece attached by id to the findings and entities it concerns — so an article shows up on those records automatically, and a link to something that does not exist fails the build rather than shipping as a dead claim.
Mapping the two-server estate
How one reverse-IP lookup on a cable manufacturer's web host surfaced the corporate mail infrastructure of a sanctioned business group.
Findings
Hamsho's own signature, on the estate's own letterhead
A 2016 letter to Syria's Director General of Customs, on Syrian Council for Metals and Steel letterhead, is signed by Mohammed Hamsho himself as Chairman of the Board — and lists info@hadeed-mmc.com, a domain already in this estate, as the Council's official contact address.
A named, sanctioned principal
The archived corporate site of Sama Alsham Group carries a "Message from the CEO". It is signed by a man who is himself under sanctions — the son of Mohammed Hamcho.
A declared three-country offshore layer
Sama Alsham's own site names its foreign subsidiaries outright: AMH Group in Dubai, EBLA Trade Off-shore in Beirut, and EGC in Egypt. Ebla Trade Services S.A. is already a designated entity.
Expert Blue, Emirates Towers
Expert Blue L.L.C. — 23rd floor, Jumeirah Emirates Towers, Dubai — trades general goods and livestock, exporting sheep to Qatar and the UAE and cattle to Kuwait. Its own footer reads "A member of AMH Investment Group". Independently confirmed active in the Dubai company registry under CBLS 273399.
Designated entities on one mail server
Three entities named directly in Mohammed Hamcho's EU/UK designation — Hamsho Communication, Syria Metal Industries and Jupiter — run their corporate mail on the same server as the rest of the estate.
Hamsho Group still sits on the live server
hamsho-group.com and gaia-printing.com remain configured as virtual hosts on the same physical machine that serves the entire live Union estate, though neither resolves in public DNS any more.
Gaia is a captive operator, not a website contractor
Gaia runs corporate mail for the whole estate on a dedicated second server, holds the DNS, and holds the single registrar account every domain sits in. That is an in-house IT function wearing a vendor's name.
Union Electrical Group is part of the Hamsho estate
Union's ten domains run on the same Gaia-operated infrastructure as the rest of the estate — hosting, nameservers, and the single Dynadot registrar account — and its cable and metals product line matches the family's documented business lines exactly.
A remittance brand, blocked in four spellings
Tahweel is Arabic for money transfer. Four transliterations were registered within one second of each other in September 2015 and all four are now suspended.
Itsal Plus was mis-filed as a third party — it's SamaTel's OPPO line
itsalplus.com had been carried as a generic mail-only client on Gaia's Server B, no different from the ~90 unrelated businesses it shares hosting with. Two independent sources say otherwise: an investigative piece names it directly as a Hamsho holding, and a Damascus mobile-retail professional's own employment history treats it and SamaTel as one operation, not two.
Hamcho's own horse registry names him owner
ghabra.com had been carried as a generic third-party mail client on Server B. Its own archived pages are a horse-pedigree database, and one entry lists Mohammed Hamcho by name as both owner and breeder — matching animal farming and horse trading, a business line named directly in his OFAC designation.
Palmyra Village's own contact details match Hamsho International Group's
Palmyra Village & Resort's own "site under construction" holding page lists a Damascus P.O. Box and fax number — the exact P.O. Box and fax OpenSanctions lists for Hamsho International Group itself.
An internal Hadeed memo names a commission recipient and a rival Hmeisho company
A 2014 internal Hadeed Metal Manufacturing memo records a large commission paid to Samir Hmeisho's company for scrap-iron purchases, and separately describes market competition from a company it calls "Emad Hmeisho's" over preferential electricity tariffs.
Jupiter's four sanctioned owners are now all named
OCCRP reported that Jupiter for Investments is owned by relatives of Mohammed Hamcho, "including four who are under sanctions." This register had documented only three and flagged a fourth as unidentified. The fourth is Ali Mohamad Hamcho — a third Hamcho son, on the OFAC SDN list since April 2023 — and Ahmad Saber Hamcho's own directory profile independently names him a founding 11% (1,100-share) partner of the Jupiter vehicle.
The Al-Dabbas name reaches Hamsho by marriage, not just affiliation
Mohammed Hamcho's wife is Rania al-Dabbas — designated with the four children under the Caesar Act in June 2020. The Al-Dabbas surname is the same one carried by DAK's owners (Fadi, Ghiyath and Abeer Al-Dabbas) and by Fadi al-Dabbas, reported co-founder of the Hamsho-protection security firm Hisn al-Sham. The marriage is the first documented family bridge between the Hamsho line and the Al-Dabbas names threaded through the Sama Alsham food and security clusters.
"Seif Alsham" ties the family's horse interests to a live domain
Ahmad Saber Hamcho's directory profile names Mohammed Hamsho as General Manager and founding partner of شركة سيف الشام (Seif Alsham), with Ahmad himself holding a founding 9% (27 shares). The register's previously-unlinked seifalsham.com — the Seif Alsham Equestrian Club, نادي سيف الشام للفروسية — sits on the estate's corporate mail server, connecting a Hamsho company to a live piece of the digital estate.
Gaia's own owner is married into a Hamsho-surnamed household
Gaia's owner and CEO, Anas Othman, is identified by his own Facebook profile. The same profile shows him married since 27 February 2016 to Shefaa Hamsho Othman, whose own profile confirms the marriage, carries the Hamsho surname, and lists her work as design at Sama TV — a Sama Alsham Group subsidiary already in this register. It is the first personal, rather than purely technical, link found between the operator of the estate's infrastructure and the estate itself.
Nothing at that confidence level.