Two companies held by John Frangos have been deleted from official shipping registers, leaving the Greek owner without any known active maritime entities to his name.
The operating licences of Irika Shipping SA and First Lines Company SA were revoked after the pair failed to submit annual business activity reports, as ship-management outfits are required to under Greek law.
Shipping ministry officials filed the deregistration papers on Christmas Eve and published them online on 21 January.
The demise of First Lines and Irika shows that Frangos was unwilling to breathe new life into the two outfits after they were left without ships following transactions with creditors and ongoing litigation with his sister, Angeliki Frangou.
TradeWinds reported at the end of 2019 that four bulkers managed by Irika were sold to US hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management. The quartet later emerged under ownership of Navios Maritime Partners, which bought it for $37m. Navios Maritime Partners is controlled by Frangou.
Litigation between the siblings emerged in October over a different set of bulkers. Frangos filed legal notices in Athens claiming, among other things, that his sister owed First Lines $1.18m in outstanding ship-management fees.
Frangou rejected the allegations and launched a legal counter-attack in London, as TradeWinds reported.
Stately mansion
The London litigation provided the first publicly available documents to establish that First Lines was owned by Frangos. The company had maintained an extremely low profile since being established in 2008. Irika is an older outfit that has existed since at least 2002.
First Lines and Irika were listed under separate addresses in Athens but both belonged to the same stately mansion in the posh suburb of Kifissia.
It is unclear where the de-registration of First Lines and Irika leaves Frangos as a shipowner. Some believe he may have had a role in Maritime Enterprises Management (MEM), another private Frangou family outfit in Piraeus.
However, London litigation documents clarify that MEM is controlled by Frangou. MEM is the successor of Franser Shipping — the first company vehicle she established back in 1990.
The only shipping stake that Frangos is currently known to control is a 47.5% stake in Maritime Investments Holding (MIH) — a holding company for shipowning subsidiaries, in which Frangou owns an equal stake.
Distressed debt investor Strategic Value Partners is the minority, linchpin shareholder in that structure.
However, MIH has also been left without ships. The company used to own two bulkers, both of which were sold last year — one for scrap and the other for further trading.
Winter cleaning
Irika and First Lines are not the only companies to suffer a quiet bureaucratic death as Greek authorities sought out those companies that failed to provide the mandated annual reports.
Another outfit that formally gave up the ghost is Probulk Shipping & Trading SA. Creditors are still chasing the Alexandros Tsakos-led firm for at least $10m after two of its ships were abandoned in Djibouti. The ships were eventually sold for scrap to satisfy Djibouti creditors, to the exclusion of all others.
The episode caused outrage in Greece and sparked protests from the West of England protection and indemnity club, which accused Djibouti of treating the crew members as "hostages".
Another company put to bed last month was Louis Hellenic Cruises Ltd. The outfit operated the 22,400-gt Sea Diamond (built 1986) — a cruiseship that sank in 2007 off the Aegean island of Santorini in front of rolling television cameras.
As a commercial brand, Louis Hellenic Cruises was quickly abandoned after the sinking.
Also no longer registered with Greek authorities is Edem Marine SA, a company that used to be controlled by late shipowner Emmanouil Pananidis. In 2018, Edem saw creditors foreclose on and auction-off one of the supramaxes it controlled.
In the same year, interests linked to the company paid $380,000 in an out-of-court settlement with brokers.
MIM Maritime Inc of Antonios Bertsos also saw its license revoked.
Fortis Bulkers Inc is an exception in that it asked authorities itself to be deleted. Fortis — a vehicle of the Kasapoglou family that got into a tiff with lender Eurobank — was a rare example of a Greek oceangoing shipping company based in the northern city of Thessaloniki.
