Mannol: Still Committed to U.K. After Dumping Case

Lord, a 40-year industry veteran, decided to look at Lubriage’s sales activity in 2022 after he was told the company was targeting his customers with deals he thought too good to be true. He noticed that Lubriage was selling high volumes of very cheap products onto the U.K. market at less than cost. 

“As far as trading in the U.K., they [Lubriage] were always a nuisance,” he said. “They were very cheap, but they weren’t particularly a problem because we could just about compete with them.” Aztec itself has a reputation in the industry for aggressive pricing, something Lord admits.  

Repeated complaints to the Serious Fraud Office and HM Revenue and Customs, the nation’s tax collector and customs manager, were met with silence. Finally, he turned to the Trade Remedies Authority, a   government agency that protects U.K. businesses from unfair international trade practices.  

Lubriage’s former lawyer told Lubes’n’Greases that it was “being attacked by a competitor who simply cannot compete on price,” calling Lord’s calculations “magical thinking.” Lord estimated that Lubriage has cost his company both customers and £10 million (U.S. $13.7 million at February’s exchange rate) worth of sales. Other companies claimed to have been similarly affected, including Granville Oil and Morris Lubricants. 

Backstory  

Jevgenij Lyzko, a Lithuanian national employed by SCT in Germany, set up Aslanol in the U.K. in 2013 to sell car parts and Lubriage in 2015 as an online shop. Lyzko also set up Carousel Car Parts, Gear Cube, Truck Cube and Circle Auto Lounge Ltd., all now dissolved.  

By July 2019, Aslanol was bankrupt, and control of Lubriage transferred to Mannol Holdings Ltd, with Erik Sudheimer, nephew of SCT owner Juri Sudheimer, the majority shareholder. SCT’s Mannol-branded products are imported from UAB SCT Lubricants in Lithuania and SCT Chemical Trading FZE in the United Arab Emirates.  

After Erik Sudheimer came on board, Lubriage’s fortunes changed rapidly, according to public balance sheets filed with the U.K. government. In 2019, gross profit was £388,000. By 2021, it grew to more than £5 million, and in the latest accounts stood at £4.95 million for 2024.  

As sales grew, so did warehousing, and from 2019 to 2023, the year-end value of Lubriage’s U.K. inventories rose from £866,785 to £21.2 million. Unpaid customer invoices totaled £40 million, almost double the value of stock, the accounts showed.  

According to Lord, before 2022 Lubriage was selling products at about 15% above Aztec’s manufactured cost, based on Lubriage prices advertised online and company price sheets and invoices, allowing Aztec to still sell at 5% above Lubriage’s price point. After 2022, Lubriage offered prices between 25% and 50% below Aztec’s costs, Lord said.  

Unconvincing Claims  

Lord showed Lubes’n’Greases an invoice from March 2024 for 1,000-liter intermediate bulk containers of hydraulic fluid that Lubriage bought from SCT for $1,350 per unit. It sold the same product to a customer in Ireland for $822.28, a loss of $527 per unit. Lubriage would not disclose sales volumes, but Lord contends that the growth of the company’s business is reflected in data about U.K. finished lubricant imports from Lithuania and the UAE, the two countries where SCT operates lube manufacturing plants. SCT is not the only UAE company exporting lubricants to the U.K.

Similarly, Aztec alleged that Mannol engine oils were being sold on Amazon at similar losses, based again on invoices for product procured from SCT Chemical Trading and estimates of other costs. (See figures 1 and 2.) 

Figure 1. Comparing Prices and Selected Costs for Mannol Lubricants

Figure 2. Loss Calculation for Mannol 5W-30 Synthetic Engine Oil

In 2019, passenger car motor oil and hydraulic fluid imports from Lithuania amounted to 1,090 metric tons, according to U.K. government trade statistics. By the end of 2024, that number had more than quadrupled to 4,595 tons. Over the same period, imports of the same products from the UAE rose more than 90-fold from 307 tons to 28,572 tons.  

Lubriage said in a public document sent to TRA investigators that it imported between 4,000 tons per year and 5,500 t/y of products in question from UAB SCT Lubricants during the period of interest.  

Current demand for U.K.-manufactured engine and hydraulic oil is around 220,000 tons per year, according to figures collated by Aztec from market research firm Kline & Co. and other sources.  

Tariffs  

The TRA thought enough of Lord’s allegations to open an investigation in June 2024. It decided that engine oils and hydraulic fluids exported from Lithuania and the UAE were being dumped and were damaging U.K. trade. It established “there had been price undercutting of the goods concerned” by 37% of U.K. sales prices.  

In September 2025, the TRA recommended duties of 84.72% on finished lubricants coming from Lithuania and 34.35% on those from the UAE. It also called for requiring importers of those goods to obtain a bank guarantee, secure a bond or pay a cash deposit equal to the provisional duty against their customs declaration.  

“I was shocked [by] the Lithuanian tariff,” Erik Sudheimer told Lubes’n’Greases at the time of the announcement. “This is absolutely insane.” 

Lord applauded the TRA’s confirmation that there is product dumping of engine oils and hydraulic fluids in the U.K. and its recommendation of tariffs. 

“I feel vindicated,” he said.  

Testing and Relabeling  

Mannol products  have also been flagged by a U.K. organization monitoring adherence to lubricant performance standards. Verification of Lubricant Standards was established by the United Kingdom Lubricants Association in 2013 as a watchdog over lube suppliers . Since then, VLS received complaints of invalid performance claims for 11 Mannol products — the most cases of any company in the VLS file. UKLA Director David Wright commented that Lubriage had been improving its compliance efforts more recently. 

Multiple former Lubriage employees have told Lubes’n’Greases that management frequently directed staff to replace customer orders with other products and used false labels to mislead them into believing they were receiving the ordered goods. The original labels were applied by the suppliers SCT FZE in Dubai before export to the U.K.  

“Across the seven months that I worked there … customers would call back saying that items were missing,” former sales team member Alexander Taylor said. “They’d call back saying that items were damaged. But especially, they’d say that the item was the wrong spec.

“They’d say this oil is the wrong color or this oil smells funny.” Taylor at first thought these kinds of complaints were normal and due to honest mistakes. But then he found a sheaf of Mannol labels used to replace originals and a spreadsheet on the shared company server that he and another former employee said was used to record products that had been substituted and relabeled. Lubes’n’Greases viewed a video of the labels recorded by Taylor and the spreadsheet.

In some cases, the replacement products were quite similar to the products that had been ordered, but in others they differed significantly, sometimes to the point of being considered incompatible. (See Figure 3.)  

Figure 3. Examples of Replacement Products Delivered to Lubriage Customers

“They would take a similar product, find the closest, and then would get a load of labels, peel off the original labels [from the replacement products] and then put the new ones on,” said an employee who asked to remain anonymous. The same anonymous employee also said he feared losing his job if he refused to do as he was told, even though he suspected it wasn’t right.  

Sudheimer refuted his former employees’ accounts and denied evidence of relabeling. However, the people Lubes’n’Greases spoke to also shared images of about 10 warehouse dockets, dated between September 2024 and June 2025, that included instructions to change labels, as well as screenshots of Whatsapp text messages from management to junior staff instructing the same.  

“The allegations presented there are most likely fake,” Sudheimer told Lubes’n’Greases. “The only relabeling that really happened was brand relabeling — for example, changing Fanfaro to Mannol. In my view this is still not acceptable.”  

Fanfaro is another SCTlubricant brand.  

Growing 

Since the decision by the Department for Business and Trade to apply the TRA’s recommended tariffs last year, Lubriage appears to have returned to its previous warehouse near Northampton, and business is subdued.  

“The outcome of the U.K. Trade Remedies Authority case and the resulting tariff environment required a reassessment of the operating model,” Sudheimer told Lubes’n’Greases in February. 

Another SCT-affiliated business called Oiltrade Ltd is now registered at the Kettering location, according to a filing with the U.K. government’s company register.  

“We are assuming they will run Lubriage through and restart with Oiltrade. How they work with 35% tariffs is unclear,” Lord said.  

Sudheimer said, “The structure of the U.K. operations is currently being refined and stabilized, and activity has been more limited while this adjustment process is underway.” He placed responsibility for the company’s fallacious accounts onto Lyzko, who declined to comment for this article. Sudheimer also claimed Lubriage’s finances were mishandled.  

“Preliminary findings indicate that previously reported balance sheet positions may differ from currently verified figures by an estimated amount in the region of U.S. $70 million,” Sudheimer said.  

Sudheimer said Lubriage has reformed its business practices and is committed to remaining in the British market.

“Recent developments have prompted us to review our approach, and it became clear that the previous structure was not delivering the results we expected,” he said. “The U.K. remains an important market for us.”  

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Simon Johns is an editor with Lubes’n’Greases. Contact him at Simon@LubesnGreases.com.