Singapore Bunker Supplier Tankoil Declared Bankrupt, "Milestone" Hailed for OW Bunker Proceedings

Trustees of DOT have been working to have Tankoil declared bankrupt since last year.

Tankoil Marine Services (Tankoil), Singapore's sixth biggest bunker supplier for 2014 and a key debtor of the now-defunct OW Bunker subsidiary Dynamic Oil Trading (DOT), has been declared bankrupt, according to reports in the Danish media.

OW Bunker trustee John Sommer Schmidt, from law firm Gorrissen Federspiel, has hailed the development as a "milestone" that will pave the way to understanding exactly what happened during the alleged fraud at DOT, and the part it played in the collapse of OW Bunker.

When OW Bunker was declared bankrupt, it reported a "risk management" related loss of $150 million, but also that a $125 million fraud had been uncovered at DOT.

Soon after, it was revealed that the alleged fraud involved a large amount of credit being given to an unknown number of players in the form of credit sleeving.

Tankoil was subsequently revealed as the principal recipient of DOT's credit along with a second company, Petrotec Pte Ltd (Petrotec), with Tankoil and Petrotec sharing a common director named as Dennis Tan.

In December Ship & Bunker reported that trustees of DOT has been working hard to have the supplier declared bankrupt as the relationship between Tankoil and DOT could not be examined until that happened.

In the meantime, the whereabouts of the money and "unfathomable amounts" of bunkers was a mystery, they said.

Milestone

"It is a milestone that we have achieved and we are very pleased," said Schmidt of the bankruptcy.

"Our information flow is constantly stopped when we have been looking through Dynamic Oil Trading. We could not see what was over on the other side of Tankoil.

"But now we can through the bankruptcy. So it is very important in terms of getting the full picture of what has happened in Singapore."

The development should allow the trustees to understand why DOT was not repaid by Tankoil, and where the money went, Schmidt added.

Moving forward, the Danish trustees were said to be forming a partnership with the newly appointment trustees in Singapore to get physical access to Tankoil's offices.

However Schmidt warned the process will take time to produce answers, but more would be known throughout August and September when they, together with the local trustees, "put the two pieces together and get the full picture."

He also gave little hope that any money would be recovered that could be returned to investors, saying: "I can only say that Tankoil is bankrupt because they could not pay."

The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) revoked Tankoil's bunker supplier licence in February, saying only that "routine checks" had revealed "discrepancies and wrongful declarations in the records kept on board their bunker tankers," and "incidences of transfers of bunkers between bunker tankers that were done without MPA's approval."