The patience of Morning Swan Shipping over its embattled purchase of an open hatch bulker is again being tested after a cargo owner operator swooped in and had the ship placed back under arrest this week.
Phoenix Global DMCC, a Dubai-based commodities trader that was the owner of a cargo of rice that was carried onboard the 30,800-dwt Alkar Trust (built 1997) on its last voyage, had the bulker arrested in Singapore on Tuesday, seeking unspecified amounts for cargo owner, charter party and negligence claims it has filed against the ship.
Arrest a blow to buyer
The arrest came as a blow for the Chinese buyer of the ship, which has been waiting to take delivery of it since signing a purchase agreement back in October 2017.
The sorry saga leading to the arrest began shortly after Dina Ocean Shipping, a single-ship entity nominated as buyer by Morning Swan, a company affiliated with Zhangjiagang Oceanicwit Shipping agreed to buy the Alkar Trust from Ocean Trust Marshall, for $4.92m. The ship, believed to be ultimately controlled by Japanese interests, was at the time being operated by Negmar Denizcilik of Turkey.
Prior to its planned delivery in Singapore in December last year, the ship was fixed to Phoenix Global to carry a cargo of white rice from Myanmar to Madagascar. Morning Swan agreed to extend the delivery date to 31 January 2018 so that the voyage could be performed, but ultimately had to wait a lot longer that.
First the ship was arrested in the Malagasy port of Toamasina over a cargo damage claim filed by a cargo receiver.
It took until April this year for that dispute to be resolved. The ship, for reasons not explained in Singapore legal proceedings, left Madagascar with around 5,000 tons of rice still on board.
The ship was seized off the Indonesian island of Batam shortly thereafter while transshipping the remaining rice onto another vessel.
The Indonesian navy claimed that the ship was conducting an illegal transshipment.
Indonesian news reports at the time indicated that the rice cargo was seized by local authorities, although it remains unclear whether this cargo was subsequently released when the ship was finally allowed to leave Indonesian territorial waters.
Arrival at long last
It was only in August that the Alkar Trust finally arrived in Singapore for handover to its buyers.
That move led to another brief arrest, this time by Morning Swan and Dino Ocean, who claimed they had not been given sufficient notice period to take delivery of the ship.
They made it clear that they did not trust Ocean Trust Marshall’s assertions that the ship would be ready for handover until it physically appeared in the port of Singapore.
They arrested the vessel to prevent it leaving port before the handover was completed.
TradeWinds was unable to ascertain to whom the Alkar Trust officially belonged at the time of this week’s arrest as the parties involved in the saga were either unreachable, or declined to comment.
Shipping databases such as the IHS Ships Register show the vessel as having passed into Dino Ocean ownership and renamed Kira Ocean as far back as April.
In their affidavit of arrest filed with the High Court of Singapore two weeks ago, Morning Swan and Dino Ocean explained that this had come about because of steps they had begun taking to reflag the ship under the Tuvalu flag during one of the previous occasions that Ocean Trust Marshall had sent notice indicating that delivery of the ship was imminent.
