Norwegian shipowner and investor Tom Steckmest has emerged as chairman of the companies in control of the former fleet of Polarcus.
The move took place a week after Norway's DNB Bank and export credit agency Giek repossessed six of Oslo-listed Polarcus' specialised seismic fleet.
On 26 January, Polarcus announced that the lenders had stopped extending covenant waivers, triggered a mortgage default and unexpectedly seized the ships.
That left Polarcus in control of one vessel, the 4,711-gt Vyacheslav Tikhonov (built 2011), which is bond financed, with three years' charter employment in place with Russia's Sovcomflot (SCF Group).
Polarcus had been downsizing before that move, but 250 employees are understood to have lost their jobs through the bank action.
A Steckmest representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Steckmest steps in
But well-informed sources told TradeWinds that DNB and Giek transferred the six Polarcus subsidiaries that held the seized ships to an otherwise unknown Norwegian entity called Tiger Moth AS.
Norwegian reference source Proff.no shows that Tiger Moth was first registered in November 2020 under a numerical corporate name by Steckmest's law firm Thommessen, with a Thommessen partner as chairman. On 1 February, one week after the vessels were seized, the company was renamed and Steckmest stepped in as chairman.
Added challenge
The previously existing registered owning companies of the ships plus vessel-owning platform Polarcus Shipholding AS also now show Steckmest as chairman.
Sources close to Polarcus are unsure whether Steckmest's role is to acquire the ships himself or to warehouse them for banks pending a sale.
Steckmest is best known as a tanker owner through his Bergen-based Viken Shipping and as one of the shareholders behind ship manager Wallem, but he has a history in other segments. Offshore is not among them. In 2016, he started a company called Viken Offshore aimed at opportunistic buying of offshore fleets, not necessarily specialised seismic vessels, but that company was closed down in 2018.
"The market hadn't come back, and it still hasn't," said John Wiik, the former chairman of the Norwegian Hull Club, whom Steckmest hired to run Viken Offshore. "We took a decision together to close down the company."
There would be an added challenge in trying to take over a seismic fleet unless Steckmest has a specific contract ready for the ships and can assemble an operating organisation swiftly.
"I think Steckmest is someone who is just warehousing the ships for the banks," said one industry source. "He is a shipowner, but running a seismic company as a specialised offshore service for big oil companies is a different beast."
However, some observers speculate that the bank moves could imply that an end user was waiting before the banks decided to swoop.
Pretty aggressive
"It was a pretty aggressive move," said a source close to the company. "These are specialised assets and if the banks didn't have some idea about how to use them, they're not going to get great recovery."
All but one of the ships were laid up when banks gave the order to sail them to safe harbours in preparation for a sale, and it is not clear where the demand will come from.
"There were really three players before Polarcus' fleet was seized: Polarcus, PGS and Shearwater," said the source. "PGS has more ships than they need. And Shearwater has done so much consolidating and has got so many boats, with only a few active and many that they could reactivate quickly if they needed them.
"And both those companies are overleveraged."
