Belgian owner Euronav has revealed a sales gain of $18m after four VLCCs joined the fleet of US owner Ridgebury Tankers.
The New York and Oslo-listed company said the quartet was redelivered from a five-year sale-and-leaseback deal.
The tankers are the 307,000-dwt sisters Nautilus (built 2006) and Navarin, Neptun and Nucleus (all built 2007). They were built at China’s Dalian Shipbuilding.
As the first ship was redelivered on 15 December, $4.5m of the gain will be booked in the fourth quarter. The remaining $13.5m goes on the books in the first three months of 2022.
Euronav retains 41 VLCCs. The company also recently welcomed two newbuildings, the 157,000-dwt suezmax pair Cedar and Cypress, two of five vessels joining through to 2024.
A return to VLCCs
Connecticut-based Ridgebury Tankers returned to the VLCC business with a deal for the Euronav VLCCs in April last year.
Chief executive Bob Burke confirmed to TradeWinds that the owner had bought out the interests of Wafra Capital Partners in the ships.
They were under the commercial control of Euronav, which financed them through a sale-and-leaseback transaction with Kuwait’s Wafra in January 2017.
The financial deal had the quartet on bareboat charter to Euronav at $22,000 a day.
The reported sale price was substantially below levels estimated by VesselsValue, which put the value of the ships at between $32m and $34.1m last April.
The tankers operate in Tankers International, a pool that Ridgebury has used when it owned VLCCs in the past.
Ridgebury first entered the VLCC trade in 2015 with an en-bloc purchase of four units from Independent Tankers Corp.
The company bought then four more VLCCs in 2017 and 2018, with one being Euronav’s 298,000-dwt Artois (built 2001). That vessel had been trading under Tankers International, and Ridgebury elected to keep it in the pool.
The Connecticut shipowner began to sell off its VLCCs in 2019 and disposed of its final ships in June 2020.
