NewLead Holdings said it has dispatched an engineer to a chartered-in bitumen tanker that was left at a Norwegian port after the ship began taking on water.
Firefighters were called out 7 February to the port of Drammenhavn to pump water from the 3,370-dwt Ioli (built 2009), according to local port officials. The ship had taken on "several thousand" litres of water in the engineroom, the port officials said.
A spokesperson for NewLead Holdings says it has been in contact with the ship's mortgagee, National Bank of Greece, over ship repairs and that it dispatched an engineer to inspect the vessel. Port officials say an engineer arrived in Drammen this week to close the valves on the ship to prevent further damage.
The NewLead representative was unable to say whether it will begin trading the ship commercially again.
The Ioli had been abandoned by its crew last October after NewLead failed to pay the crew's wages in a timely manner.
National Bank of Greece has a first priority mortgage on the Ioli and 3,357-dwt Katerina L (built 2009), which is moored in Piraeus.
The ship resided in shallow waters so it was not in danger of sinking. But port officials had largely been stymied in figuring out who is responsible for the vessel. They said NewLead had failed to respond to repeated queries about the vessel's status.
NewLead executed a bareboat charter agreement in 2015 for the Ioli with an entity called Frourio Compania Naviera for minimum lease payments of $5.4m. The lease payments were to pay off the interest obligations for the mortgage on the Ioli.
A NewLead spokesperson said back in December the vessel's beneficial owner is Pelagos Holdings. Attorney Nikolaos Remandas is listed as a director of Pelagos Holdings in NewLead's financial filings.
