Total Fina Pays for Erika: Would a Vulture Bondholder?

By far the grimmest stories out of the New Year turnover had nothing to do with Y2K plagues, but were instead of oil spills, along the French coast and in Turkey. More than 17,000 birds have been oiled along 300 kilometers of France’s south Breton coastline. The New York Times in its first Sunday edition of the new millennium ran a quarter page picture of an oiled cormorant; an “innocent bystander” picked up on Turkey’s Florya coast. Not a great start for the tanker industry.

It seemed as if oil were everywhere. The two incidents are dramatically different linked only by the series of deadly storms that have ravaged so much of the European continent the past weeks. About all that can be safely stated today is that there will be a fall out from the two disasters that will reach far into the fabric of the industry.

Together the two spills involved 32,300 tons of oil (Erika carried 28,000 tons and the Volgoneft 248 carried 4,300 tons). To date an estimated 8,000 tons (2.4 million gallons) have spilt from the Erika and 1,300 tons have spilt from the Russian vessel. More than 23,000 tons remain on the two stricken vessels.

This is only an excerpt of Total Fina Pays for Erika: Would a Vulture Bondholder?

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