Freshly Minted – March 30, 2000

LOW YIELD

GOLDEN OCEAN’ ONE SHIP AT A TIME

Freshly Minted understands that Frontline has agreed to provide $13 million in mezzanine financing to ensure tomorrow’s delivery of VLCC Hull 1628 from Kawasaki Heavy. The ship is being financed by Chase and Kawasaki has agreed to provide top off financing. 1628 is going on charter to Shell. Hull 1628’s sister, 1638, is scheduled to be delivered in from Kawasaki in June. Freshly Minted also understands that Frontline may have agreed to provide Golden Ocean with a $5 million DIP facility. The sole use of proceeds will be to pay advisors and other professional fees associated with the restructuring. Advisors include American Marine Advisors and Seward & Kissel for Golden and Zolfo Cooper and Cadwalader for the unsecured creditors. Finally, FM has learned that Al Fried, one of Golden’s largest bondholders, has resigned from the Committee of Unsecured Creditors for reasons unknown to us. Mr. Freid has been replaced by Jess Ravich of Libra Securities. Mr. Ravich was one of the original underwriters of the Golden Ocean bond offering and, we understand, is the holder of warrants for 8% of the equity in Golden Ocean. The warrants have a strike price of about $46 and are decidedly out of the money. It is our understanding that Golden Ocean was counseled to attach the equity warrants onto the bonds to give bondholders some upside. However, market sources indicate that underwriters “clipped” the detachable warrants from notes and retained them. We will give a extensive review of the transaction involving Fred Cheng, Cobelfret, Nick Goymer and the Lowlands Rose in next week’s issue.

NAVIGATOR MANAGEMENT TERMINATES MARLINK A Termination notice has been sent to NavGas bondholders informing them that Navigator Management has terminated the company’s management agreement with Marlink. Getting rid of Marlink may not be that simple. The NavGas indenture and security agreement indicates that the NavGas trustee may have been assigned control over the agreement. The reason for this assignment may be that Marlink was a key member of the original Navigator team and the trustee was given control in an effort to protect bondholder interests. Marlink has commenced arbitration.

BANKS AND BANKERS

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