A likely dark fleet VLCC has changed hands for the fourth time in as many years.
The 305,750-dwt Gesi (built 2007) was sold for $43.3m by its Turkish owners to undisclosed buyers, according to several broker reports.
The sale price is “somewhat discounted from the $48m they paid to acquire the vessel a year ago”, a US broker said.
Another told TradeWinds the ship was a dark fleet vessel.
Exactly who controls it is an open question.
According to shipping database Equasis, the Gesi was in the fleet of Istanbul-based manager Route Shipping from March this year. Its registered owner, Big Horizon, lists Route Shipping’s offices as its forwarding address.
Clarksons lists unknown ownership, while VesselsValue lists Turkish company Signum Ship Management.
No contact information for any of the companies could be found.
The tanker first changed hands in 2021, when TCC Group sold it to EGPN Bulk Carrier in an all-Hong Kong deal for $30.7m.
The next year, it was sold to unspecified Middle Eastern interests for $36.5m, then again in 2023 for either $48m or $48.5m to what Clarksons describes as Far Eastern interests but which VesselsValue identifies as Signum Ship Management.
After the 2023 sale, Turkey’s Inza Marine Denizcilik took over both technical and commercial management for five months until Route Shipping stepped in, Equasis shows.
The shift to Route Shipping coincided with the ship dropping the Panamanian flag in favour of Palau.
No brokers identified a buyer in the most recent sale.
The rise and growth of the dark fleet — vessels owned by opaque interests and served by non-traditional insurers, flag states and classification societies in order to trade illicit cargoes — has helped prop up values for older VLCCs.
Clarksons data shows a 15-year-old VLCC as worth $35m in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and supercharged non-mainstream shipping.
Values hit $60m by January 2023 and stayed there until May that year, when they began cooling.
So far in October, values hover at $56m, lower than five-year-old and 10-year-old vessels, whose values ticked up recently.
VesselsValue estimates the Gesi is worth $45.8m, while MSI Horizon gives a range of between $42.2m and $50.6m.
The vessel has spent much of the year as floating storage offshore Singapore.
