Advantage Tankers, a Swiss-based owner of crude and product carriers, has disclosed the acquisition of a 12-year suezmax from Navigare Capital.
The fleet list on the company’s website has been recently updated to include the 156,600-dwt Advantage Sugar (built 2011).
Company managers confirm the ship is the former Navigare Tolero, which was previously controlled by Denmark’s Navigare Capital.
Price details have not been made available. The deal, which largely escaped brokers’ attention, took place a little more than two months ago.
The scrubber-fitted ship was delivered to its new owners at the end of April.
The timing of the transaction suggests a very lucrative deal for Navigare, which had purchased the vessel in late 2018 for about $31m.
Signal Ocean’s online valuation suggests it was worth about $42m at the end of February, when Navigare agreed to sell it to Advantage Tankers.
Navigare, a company founded in 2017 and backed by Robert Maersk Uggla invests in maritime assets, debt and securities.
A busy asset player with a mixed fleet worth about $1bn, Navigare was linked to another profitable tanker sale recently — that of the 50,000-dwt Kiribora (built 2013).
As for Nazli Williams-owned Advantage Tankers, its fleet managers may be familiar with their newly acquired suezmax.
The Advantage Sugar used to trade as Center with Geden Lines — a Turkish company owned by Williams’ father Emin Karamehmet.
Geden sold the ship in 2015 to US-based leasing company Icon Capital and took it back on bareboat charter until 2016, when Icon wrested control of the ship after claiming that Geden was behind on hire payments.
Two years later, Icon sold the ship to Navigare.
The crew is well
Advantage Tankers’ suezmax purchase preceded the dramatic seizure last month of another of its suezmaxes by Iran.
The Iranian navy stormed the 159,100-dwt Advantage Sweet (built 2012) on 27 April — most likely to get its hands on the Chevron cargo the ship was carrying, as leverage to secure the release of an Iranian seaborne cargo seized in parallel by the US.
The Advantage Sweet, which was sailing in the Strait of Hormuz, has been taken to Iran since. On 1 May, Advantage Tankers management expressed concerns over the welfare of the tanker's seafarers after failing to establish contact with them.
Since then, however, the concerns have eased.
“We have normal communication with the master and crew and they are all fine,” the company’s chief executive Tugrul Tokgoz told TradeWinds in an e-mail.
