![COLUMN | It's all gone wrong: Nigerian corruption trial; DP World boss scandal; Saudi ski games cancelled [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-02-09%2F54lmy9dg%2FUntitled.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
I keep meaning to write a sale and purchase update as in the last few weeks. For sellers everything has gone right.
Norway’s Golden Energy Offshore sold its platform supply vessels (PSVs) Energy Empress (built in 2019) and Energy Partner (built in 2016) for a combined total of over US$57 million to Turkish interests believed to be associated with the state oil company TPAO. Golden Energy booked a one-off profit of over US$12 million from the sale.
The company had originally acquired Energy Partner in 2023 as part of the badly executed breakup of Vroon Offshore Services for an estimated US$21 million, buying the vessel from the distressed debt department of Dutch bank ABN Amro. The Alesund-based player retains four more PSVs of the same design as the first two in its fleet.
As recently as December, Golden Energy faced a cash crunch and was forced to raise NOK320 million (US$32 million) in a private placement from its shareholders as the company struggled with low North Sea spot rates and an apparent dispute with the charterer of one of its managed subsea construction vessels in the Mediterranean. Now the sale of Empress and Partner has boosted liquidity and profits.
There were also sales of the 1,000-square-metre clear deck PSVs Rem Hrist and Rem Mist, which were both built in 2011 at Ulsteinvik, by John Fredriksen’s Sea Tankers Management for a rumoured US$25 million each, one to Delta Logistics of Trinidad and one to Norwegian owner Simon Møkster Shipping.
The prices are far above the two most recent Bourbon PSV sales at the ICBC auction process, Bourbon Front (built 2011) and Bourbon Clear (built 2012), which sold last week at their reserve price of only US$19 million apiece. We think they were sold back to Bourbon itself, like the sister vessel Bourbon Calm last year, which now has a five-year charter with ExxonMobil in Guyana.
Similarly, the light construction vessel Bourbon Evolution 807 also sold only for its reserve price of US$35 million. The sister vessel Bourbon Evolution 805 will be auctioned on February 27 with the same US$35 million reserve price.
That’s the good news of the week: healthy deals at healthy prices. As we predicted last year, the God of Small Deals is currently presiding over the offshore market, with vessel by vessel deals in vogue, at least until Tidewater makes a breakthrough with its much discussed but not yet consummated American corporate acquisition.
But more industry figures face bad news. For some, things have turned very pear-shaped very quickly.
In 2022, we reported on the high life and luxurious trappings accrued by Nigeria's former Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who became minister in the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan after a trail-blazing career in Shell. Then, in 2014, she was elected as the first female President of OPEC. We noted that, “throughout her career, Alison-Madueke has demonstrated convincingly that Nigerian women can be just as corrupt as Nigerian men.”
Last year, before the inauguration of President Trump, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) returned around US$53 million in alleged illicit funds recovered from Ms Alison-Madueke to the Nigerian treasury. The DOJ alleged that the former minister enriched herself, and others, while leading Nigeria's state oil firm Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), awarding contracts in exchange for bribes. As per the BBC, “the US alleged that the money was then used to buy a 65-metre long superyacht called Galactica Star plus multiple luxury properties in California and New York.”
In August 2017, a Nigerian federal court seized NGN7.6 billion (then US$21 million) from bank accounts linked to Ms Alison-Madueke.
We stress, of course, that Ms Alison-Madueke, aged 64, has always denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and has never been convicted in court outside Nigeria. But now she is on trial for corruption in London, facing five counts of accepting a bribe and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery at Southward Crown Court.
What’s interesting about the case is how many members of the Nigerian elite are entangled. She appeared in the dock alongside Ms Olatimbo Ayinde, 54, another oil industry executive, who is charged with two counts of bribery. The Nigerian press has reported that Ms Ayinde is, “a controversial Nigerian businesswoman and alleged mistress of President Bola Tinubu,” and that the Nigerian authorities have been slow to respond to British requests for information on her case. Strange, that.
Ms Alison-Madueke’s brother is Doye Agama, aged 69, who is (surprise) a former archbishop. He has been charged by the British prosecutors of conspiracy to commit bribery as part of her case, and he appeared in court by video link to deny the charges. In 2024, as per Punch newspaper, Ms Alison Madueke’s former husband, the previous Nigerian Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Allison (two Ls) Madueke, filed a petition in the Lagos State High Court, seeking a legal declaration to end his marriage to her and requesting that she stop using his last name. Given how she was named in court in London, that obviously failed.
All the defendants deny the charges. The prosecution has claimed that wealthy Nigerians would accompany the former minister on extravagant shopping trips in London at the high-end department store Harrods, where they paid for whatever she wanted, in return for business favours and contracts from NNPC.
Other oil executives allegedly paid for flights on private jets for Ms Alison-Madueke to destinations, which prosecutors claim included Vienna, Hamburg and Doha, with each flight costing tens of thousands of dollars, allegedly.
The court also heard allegations that Ms Alison-Madueke’s brother Doye Agama, the churchman, was part of a conspiracy to conceal bribes disguised as over US$1.4 million as charitable donations to his church in Manchester in northern England to buy a property. Unfortunately, the Financial Times reported that the name of the donor had been given incorrectly when the vendors’ representatives queried the source of funds, which raised red flags.
The former minister herself owned or benefited from the use of a number of expensive properties in London and the south of England, which were shown in court.
It is not the first time that the British authorities have pursed a corruption case involving a Nigerian government official, In 2012, James Ibori, former Governor of Delta state, was sentenced to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering.
We’ll keep you posted on the outcome of this trial. Many, both foreign and Nigerian, have asked whether the compliance and NNPC have truly strengthened since Ms Alison-Madueke was running the show. We hope so, but we doubt it.
Late last year, Dubai-headquartered ports operator DP World announced the unification of all its marine services brands, namely, Unifeeder, P&O Ferrymasters and P&O Maritime Logistics, under a single DP World brand, which it claimed would strengthen its position as a fully integrated global logistics provider.
The businesses will now operate as DP World Shipping Solutions (formerly Unifeeder), DP World Multimodal Solutions (formerly P&O Ferrymasters) and DP World Maritime Solutions (formerly P&O Maritime Logistics). The latter operates 47 offshore support vessels, including PSVs and anchor handlers, in the Middle East, Indian Ocean and West Africa. Altogether, DP World owns and operates 500 vessels across its different business divisions.
One of the unwritten rules of the United Arab Emirates is that different standards apply to different categories of people, especially to wealthy Emiratis. We have all heard the stories of what allegedly goes on behind closed doors in the UAE, the Dubai chocolate saga, and why so many Instagram influencers of both sexes with impressive physical attributes flock to the Gulf.
Unfortunately, the latest batch of Epstein file disclosures comes at a bad time for DP World and its leadership, and leave the royal family of Dubai as its shareholders with some difficult questions about what to do regarding the behaviour of DP World’s Chairman and CEO, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
Documents released by the DOJ indicate that there was an especially close relationship between the DP World boss and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2010, Mr Epstein referred to Mr bin Sulayem as his “close personal friend” whom the financier had known “for more than eight years”.
We should stress that there are no allegations of illegal behaviour by Mr bin Sulayem, but the circumstances of his relationship revealed in the emails might possibly result in the cancellation of his employment if he were a more junior staff member in DP World or other organisations. DP World has so far not commented on the documents.
However, the details are embarrassing both to the company and to Dubai itself. The disclosures show the relationship between Mr Epstein and the CEO continued all the way through Mr Epstein’s conviction in Florida in 2008 for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute, up until days before his arrest in 2019 on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.
The DP World CEO appears to have helped arrange for a Russian masseuse from MR Epstein’s “private spa” to train in Turkey at the convicted paedophile’s request, according to the emails in the DOJ cache. She was to be sent to the Rixos Hotel in Antalya, “so she gains better experiences,” the correspondence shows.
If only DP World was as keen to invest in the training of future seafarers as its CEO was to improve the skills of a masseuse.
Mr bin Sulayem also attempted to recruit the disgraced former British minister and ambassador Lord Peter Mandelson to DP World’s board in 2014 through Mr Epstein. As per the Financial Times, Mr Epstein advised Lord Mandelson in June 2014 that joining DP World would be a “good move”, writing that, “sultan [sic] has asked me to encourage you to join his board”.
The disgraced American financier also helped DP World lobby to get British government loan guarantees and investment support for its London Gateway container terminal project on the River Thames in 2009, as per the emails released.
British police have searched two properties linked to Peter Mandelson as they continue their investigation into misconduct in public office offences.
The House Oversight Committee Democrats released photos of the pair cooking together via Reuters. The record shows the CEO exchanging details of sexual experiences with women with Mr Epstein, trading photos of female partners and sharing details of establishments that offered full body massages, as well as pornographic links. Mr bin Sulayem also expressed concern to Mr Epstein in June 2013 that one potential partner might in fact be transgender.
“Dear Jeffrey, this is the one I went with in Paris. Do you think she is a he??”
Epstein replied, “The hands do look like mine,” and four pictures seem to have been attached to Mr bin Sulayem’s email, but the attachments were not included in the documents released by the DOJ.
In the same month, Mr bin Sulayem told Epstein: “I am off the [sic] sample a fresh 100 per cent female Russian at my yacht.”
This is not a good look. I doubt many regular employees would still be on the payroll after such revelations. As we have seen in Nigeria, the rich and powerful seem to cluster together in alleged malfeasance, but Mr bin Sulayem seems to be one of the few maritime figures involved with Mr Epstein.
We have been consistent in our criticism of Neom, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s multi-billion dollar vanity project at the north of the Red Sea. In 2023, we observed that, “oil, soccer and death sentences make macabre combination” and that in order to balance its budget, Saudi Arabia requires an oil price above US$80 a barrel.
Current oil prices are in the US$60s. We noted that the crude price since 2023 left a gap in the state finances needed to fund Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s "giga-projects" like the "futuristic" city of Neom.
Neom was originally budgeted at US$500 billion (with a "b"), but it ballooned to US$1.5 trillion as the difficulties of building a completely new city in the middle of nowhere became apparent (surprise!). Neom was a key part of the Crown Prince’s plans to transform the Saudi economy along with a massive new state airline to compete with Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, and hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2034, after a completely fair and transparent process.
One of the more surreal events of recent years was the decision that the 2029 Asian Winter Games would be held at the still under-construction mountain tourism resort of Trojena, part of Neom in the cold and dry mountains in northwestern Saudi Arabia.
The whole Neom development was ultimately being funded by the dividends of Saudi Aramco, the state oil company. However, it was clear that even a country with ten million barrels of oil production a day would face pressures to fund such massive developments.
The curtailment of much of Neom’s construction was already underway, with the signature glass city “The Line” being reduced from a vast, air-conditioned corridor stretching 170 kilometres through the bare desert from the Red Sea coast to just 2.4 kilometres of length. Rather than housing 1.5 million people, The Line will have about 300,000 residents in 2030, at most, as we reported in 2024.
Last week, just before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Olympic Council of Asia President Sheikh Joaan bin Hamad Al Thani thanked Kazakhstan for its commitment to winter sports. He then announced that Almaty in the central Asian state will replace Saudi Arabia as the host of the 2029 Asian Winter Games, which makes a lot more sense given the abundant snowfall in the nearby Tian Shan mountains.
"Almaty is a city with deep connections to winter sports and we have very fond memories of when we last hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2011," he said at a press conference, Reuters reported. "We have no doubt we will build on this legacy and deliver an unforgettable Games in 2029," Al Thani added.
This decision is important, as it suggests that Saudi Arabia is expecting oil prices to stay lower for longer and that Neom is getting further and further delayed and further shrunken. We have already heard reports that the Kingdom’s leading marine services contractor, Al Rawabi, has at least two dozen offshore support vessels in lay-up requiring reactivation and that it is seeking new funds to assist in their repair and reclassification.
Whilst Aramco has reinstated eight suspended jackups, including units from ADES, Saipem and Arabian Drilling, demand is unlikely to reach the heady days of March 2024, when the state oil company had 89 jackup drilling rigs on charter. Last week, Arabian Drilling notified investors that it had received formal notice from Saudi Aramco to recommence operations on two suspended offshore jackup rigs, with work scheduled to restart at prevailing market day-rates in the first quarter of 2026.
Unfortunately, delaying hosting the Asian Winter Games is a symptom that some of the gloss of the Crown Prince’s vision is wearing off.
We have commented that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but in Nigeria, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, maybe there will be some changes. One can only hope.
Background reading
Last week, we looked at the cable-lay industry. Trying to do an industry survey in 3,000 words is always hard (investors routinely pay McKinsey and BCG thousands for similar work) and we apologise to IT International Telecom for omitting them from the overview. The company operates three cableships… and looks like it could also be a candidate for fleet renewal like the Global Marine Group.
At the same time, we understand that Agalas’ new building cable laying vessel from Sefine Shipyard in Turkey will be delayed until the third quarter of this year. The ship was initially slated to deliver last year. Viking Vigor will have an LOA of 100 metres and dual-fuel propulsion, so it can be powered by methanol. Upon delivery, the vessel will be chartered for a minimum of three years with Reach Subsea.
Viking Vigor will be managed by Eidesvik Offshore and Eidesvik holds a majority stake of 50.1 per cent, with the remaining shares owned by Agalas. It is expected to be the first delivery of the next wave of cable-lay newbuildings.
