Olsen repels NATS attack

A Fred Olsen affiliate says it has taken delivery of a suezmax newbuilding from China's Bohai Shipbuilding.

Herbjorn Hansson

The revelation came to light just hours after New York-listed Nordic American Tanker Shipping (NATS) threatened to take the Norwegian outfit to arbitration over delays tied to the tanker resale.

Clune, the joint venture that offloaded two163,000-dwt contracts to NATS in 2007, says NATS has three banking days to grab the ship.

"We believe the ship is finished and ready, we took delivery today [Friday] and we sent the company [NATS] a letter of readiness, we hope this will be settled now," Clune boss Per-Oscar Lund told TradeWinds in a brief phone interview Friday.

As TradeWinds reported this morning, NATS chief Herbjorn Hansson had threatened arbitration proceedings against the Fred Olsen company after logging at least three complaints linked to the delay.

NATS bought the suezmax resales from Fred Olsen in November 2007 for around $90m each after the latter had ordered them the previous year for about $74m a piece.

In August last year NATS warned that they would be delayed by up to 10 months with the first set to be delivered in May this year and the second pushed back from April to August.

It isn't clear if NATS has abandoned its arbitration move.

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