St Kitts & Nevis-registered Nina, which specialises in buying vessels for recycling, has delivered several panamax-size containerships to shipbreakers in India and Bangladesh in recent months.
The company acquired the Henna in late January and wasted no time getting it ready for its final voyage. It was seen near Singapore last week, renamed Hen.
The sale in effect ends HNA’s attempt to gain a foothold in the Chinese cruise market.
It bought the Henna from Carnival Corp for an undisclosed sum in 2012, and subsidiary HNA Cruises operated it between China and destinations in Japan and South Korea, but with little success.
The ship was laid up in late 2005 and offered for sale at a hefty $35m. In June last year, HNA lined up a deal to sell it for scrap in China but the deal was quickly called off.
Several months later, HNA sent the Henna to a shipyard in Zhou-shan, China, where it underwent an annual hull survey and was switched from the China Classification Society to Lloyd’s Register. These moves were designed to ease a trading sale and the asking price was dropped to a more realistic $12.5m. But still no interest was shown in the ship despite these measures.
The Henna, originally built as Carnival’s Jubilee, is the first large, second-generation cruiseship built in the 1980s to be sold for scrap.
One of its peers, the 35,100-gt Qing (built 1982), is likely to follow close behind. The Qing, built as the Atlantic for now-defunct Italian cruise operator Home Lines, spent the past few years laid up in an Indian shipyard before partially sinking last June.
Indian courts are in the process of trying to find a buyer for the ship but so far nobody has been interested in taking on the task of raising the vessel and delivering it to a scrapyard. Three auction attempts have failed.
