Ocean Yield chief executive Lars Solbakken has revealed a decision is due soon in the legal battle over the ownership of four VLCCs acquired from Greece's Okeanis Eco Tankers.

Okeanis, also listed in Oslo, had served notice last year that it was exercising its repurchase option on the tankers that it chartered back.

Solbakken told a conference call: "We did not agree that they had the right to exercise those purchase options.

"So that was taken to arbitration in London in December and we expect a decision with effect to that later in February."

If the panel rules in favour of Okeanis, Ocean Yield expects to book a small net profit and a net positive cash effect of about $60m, the company has said.

The four VLCCs are the 319,000-dwt Nissos Antiparos, Nissos Despotiko, Nissos Santorini and Nissos Rhenia (all built 2019), chartered back to Okeanis on 15-year bareboat deals, with a five-year sub-charter to Koch Shipping.

Ocean Yield first announced the deal for the four ships in February 2018 when it agreed to pay a gross purchase price of $83.75m per vessel.

At the time it said Okeanis would have certain options to acquire the vessels during the charter period, with the first purchase option exercisable after seven years.

FPSO still a problem

Another blot on its landscape is the unwanted FPSO Dhirubhai-1.

"Dhirubhai has been a real headache for us since it ended the contract in September 2018," said Solbakken.

"We are actively working on different leads for the sale or other alternatives for that unit. We had hoped that we by now should have the solution, but it is taking more time, but we are actively working on the several leads."

An option agreement with Aker Energy ended in December. It was not extended, but discussions are continuing with respect to potential use of the unit in Ghana.

"We have several other opportunities...we have one opportunity that was quite hot in the autumn, but then suddenly they found more oil and they needed a larger vessel," the CEO added.

"So there we had spent a lot of time and they came quite far"

He added: "We have a new oil company coming on board next week, to inspect the vessel. So, there's a lot of activity, but it takes time from [when] you start on a new lead until they are able to conclude because a lot of technical work that needs to be done."

The Kjell Inge Rokke-backed company believes it has been very successful with its core shipping portfolio however.

"We have no defaults. We have had fantastic returns on our shipping portfolio," Solbakken said.

Offshore downturn painful

"What is hitting us is really the downturn on offshore, and you can see that from...when we split [the figures] between the vessels on long-term charter and those on short-term charter, which is basically offshore."

It has two vessels on charter to restructuring Norwegian OSV giant Solstad Offshore.

He added: "We have hardly done any offshore since 2014, so we continued to build a shipping portfolio. We have had a strong focus on liquid tonnage because we think that if something goes wrong, you can easily handle it with minimal losses.

"Whereas, if you have more illiquid tonnage, if something should go wrong, you risk that you have to put it in lay-up for a period."

He said the company has a strong focus on "liquid tonnage" tankers and bulkers with "quite long" bareboat charters.

And he added that its offshore issues has not prevented it from continuing to build the book with vessels on long-term charter to increase the charter backlog.

"And we hope that we, over the next few years, can continue then to build a larger company than we have today," Solbakken said.