Okeanis Eco Tankers, a US-listed owner of 14 large, modern crude carriers, is buying back a suezmax from financier Ocean Yield to refinance it with Taiwanese lender Bank SinoPac.
The move lowers the company’s financing costs while opening “new opportunities” for the future and “adding diversity and flexibility to our debt financing options”, its chief financial officer, Iraklis Sbarounis, said in a statement late on Thursday.
Such new partnerships become especially relevant, given “challenges that may start affecting part of the more traditional ship financing markets due to the implementation of the Basel IV banking reforms,” Sbarounis added.
The 157,500-dwt Poliegos (built 2017) was previously financed with Norwegian sale-and-leaseback specialist Ocean Yield in a $54m transaction concluded seven years ago, when the ship was delivered from Sungdong Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering.
Okeanis is now using the first option it had to buy back the vessel from Ocean Yield under the 2017 sale-and-leaseback agreement, at the pre-arranged price of $31.1m.
The $31.11m credit facility Okeanis is taking out from Bank SinoPac to fund the purchase option lowers the Greek company’s financing costs.
According to the Okeanis statement, the interest rate for the six-year Bank SinoPac facility is set at term Sofr plus 160 basis points. Once the transaction is completed in July, it will be repaid in quarterly instalments of about $780,000 each, plus a balloon payment of about $12.4m at the end of the loan.
This is “a significant reduction in pricing compared to the vessel’s previous sale-and-leaseback financing,” Sbarounis said.
The Bank SinoPac transaction is part of a wider policy that saw Okeanis refinance 12 of its 14 vessels.
According to Sbarounis, the company reduced the pricing on about $550m of debt by about 125 bps on a weighted basis, while extending maturities between 2028 and 2031.
The company aims to repeat the trick with the only two vessels it has not done so yet: the 319,000-dwt VLCCs Nissos Rhenia and Nissos Despotiko (both built 2019).
Moves to that effect are set to happen in the first half of 2026, when the company has the right to buy back the pair — again from Ocean Yield.
“We look forward to continuing working with our financiers to source the best refinancing options for the Nissos Rhenia and Nissos Despotiko in 2026, or if the opportunity arises for other accretive deals,” Sbarounis said.
