Altor: OW Bunker Collapse Was Not Our Fault

Harald Mix says Altor did nothing wrong in the events leading up the the collapse of OW Bunker

Swedish private equity fund Altor Equity Partners (Altor), the previous owners of OW Bunker, say the collapse of the former global marine fuel giant was not its fault.

Since the November 2014 bankruptcy of OW Bunker, having led it to an otherwise highly successful billion dollar IPO just seven months earlier, Altor has said very little publicly on the matter.

But in a recent and rare interview with Danish newspaper Berlingske, Altor Founder and Partner Harald Mix says the company did nothing wrong in its handling of OW Bunker, and once it realised it was in trouble, tried everything to stop it from going under.

"It is incomprehensible how a company can go down when it had such a great history, and had operations in 70 countries," said Mix, who described the dramatic events as the worst he had experienced in his career.

Since OW Bunker's demise, Altor has come under fire from angry investors who say it colluded with OW Bunker management to hide the bunker player's speculative oil market activities in the IPO prospectus.

Compounding this view, at the end of 2015 OW Bunker bankruptcy trustee Søren Halling-Overgaard released a 400-page report supporting the claim, saying both OW management and Altor had actionable knowledge that could have enabled the bankruptcy to be avoided.

Mix, however, says the report is biased, and that the trustees have not even spoken to Altor as part of its investigation.

"We hope that the facts will one day come forward. Maybe in five or six years," he said, adding that when they do "a very different picture will emerge."

OW Bunker's collapse has been attributed to two key events.

One was a $125 million "risk management" loss resulting from the collapse of oil prices; the second was a $125 million loss at its Singapore subsidiary Dynamic Oil Trading (DOT) that was described at the time by OW as a fraud, but something DOT management maintains was a case of an "untimely lack of care" as part of a legitimate credit sleeving scheme that saw a large amount of credit being built up with a single third party, Tankoil.

"When all the facts are on the table, it will be apparent that the company had a clear policy on credit and risk management. If this had not been broken, they would have performed as they would have done historically, and [the bankruptcy] would never had happened," said Mix.

"We worked around the clock to save the company. But when we discovered what had happened in Singapore, it was over."

Earlier this year a number of OW Bunker's management were charged by Danish authorities, but Mix says he does not foresee charges being laid against anyone at Altor.

"I assume that it would have to be based on facts, and as far as I know, there are no facts to support any charges," he said.

In one of the few previous comments on the matter, Altor has also defended the actions of OW Bunker's management, as well as the IPO prospectus.

At the end of 2015, in a statement released to Ship & Bunker by Altor's Tor Krussell, it said that following an "extremely thorough review of all facts available" to them, it found "no basis for any criticism of the prospectus and there was nothing to indicate that the Board of OW Bunker had information that could have prevented this tragic situation."