Turkey’s Besiktas Group has widened its already impressive tanker acquisition spree with yet another buy that brings the size of its managed fleet of crude, product, chemical and gas carriers to 32 ships.
The company’s chief executive Yavuz Kalkavan told TradeWinds in an interview in the summer of 2022 that he started seeing a story in tankers again and that he would invest in smaller chemical ships and MRs.
Kalkavan has put his money where his mouth is, adding 10 MRs and one small chemical tanker, built between 2004 and 2008.
His latest acquisition concerns the 46,600-dwt Sochrina (built 2008), which was sold by Greece’s Flynn Ventures for about $24m, according to broker reports.
Flynn, a company that emerged in 2021 with ships previously associated with John Karageorgis-controlled Greek peer Times Navigation and Holger Navigation, sold another pair of MRs at the end of November — as TradeWinds has reported.
Besiktas, which is also a partner in Sweden-based commercial manager Alba Tankers and Europe’s biggest ship-repair player, is far from the only Turkish company dramatically upping its tanker exposure.
According to TradeWinds data, players on the Bosphorus bought 53 crude and product carriers on the secondhand market last year, up from 47 in 2022 and merely 15 in 2021.
The figures include six purchases made last year by Advantage Tankers, a company that is based in Switzerland but whose owner, Nazli Karamehmet Williams, has a Turkish background.
The biggest Turkish buyer by far has been Ali Bekmezci family company Beks Ship Management & Trading, which has scooped up 28 tankers on the secondhand market since the summer of 2021 — five in 2021, 11 in 2022 and 12 in 2023.
It is hard to attribute to individual companies specific motives behind this expansion drive, as different players buy different ships with different client and employment profiles.
However, a large part of the Turkish-managed fleet’s expansion is certainly due to Western sanctions against Russia.
The Turkish government’s choice to refrain from imposing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine has opened ample trade opportunities for players established in Istanbul or setting up shop there.
Despite various visits by US officials to Turkey to discuss Russia sanctions, Washington has blacklisted just one Turkish-linked vessel on such grounds so far and its high-profile owner Yasa Holdings has challenged even that decision as wrongful.
Yasa bought just one tanker in 2022 — a VLCC that has had nothing to do with Russian trades — and none in 2023.
