Three crew members are reported missing and 25 others have been rescued from an aframax tanker that caught fire while at anchor off the coast of Malaysia.
The Japanese-built 96,800-dwt Pablo (built 1997) was reported to be ablaze in the South China Sea at an anchorage about 40 nautical miles off Pulau Tinggi, close to the entrance of the Singapore Strait.
IHS Markit lists Pablo Union Shipping as the owner and ship manager of the Marshall Island-registered, Gabon-flag tanker.
Pablo Union Shipping was registered this year and is believed to be a special purpose vehicle for the crude carrier.
Vessel tracker MarineTraffic shows the Pablo sailed from Zhoushan in China and anchored off Pulau Tinggi on 30 April. It was bound for the United Arab Emirates.
An explosion was reported to have taken place on the Pablo at around 2.40pm local time (0600 GMT) and the crew abandoned ship.
Singapore’s Maritime & Port Authority said 18 of the seafarers were rescued by Rose Shipping’s 301,000-dwt tanker MS Enola (built 2002), with another seven rescued by another ship that it did not identify.
Previously, reports indicated that four crew members were missing and an Evergreen Marine feeder container ship, the 2,926-teu Ever Bliss (built 2017), was involved in the rescue.
The Pablo’s insurer is not known. A search on the database of the International Group of P&I Clubs does not show the vessel under the Pablo name.
The ship has 28 port state control inspections on its record, with no detentions, It was last inspected in Malaysia in August and was found to have no deficiencies.
S&P's International Ships Register Global shows the tanker to have had an extremely chequered career since be sold by the Onassis Group as Olympic Spirit II to Priority Shipping in September 2018, a shipowning vehicle linked to cash buyer interests.
Two months later it was flipped to BVI-registered Nautical Wonder Ltd and renamed Hudara under the management of Indian company Melody Shipmanagement.
The ship again changed hands in June 2019, becoming the Siro I of BVI-registered Sirosea and managed by Janelle Ship Management.
The frequent changes of ownership, management and flag continued on a regular basis subsequently saw the ship trading under the names Adisa, Helios and Mockingbird before it ended up as the Pablo under the ownership of Pablo Union Shipping in April this year.
The register indicates that the ship was the only vessel controlled by these various owners and managers.
Jonathan Boonzaier and Eric Priante Martin contributed to this story.
