There will be no second chance for German shipping company Hansa Heavy Lift. Insolvency administrator Christoph Morgen has confirmed that the shipping line ‘will no longer have a business model at its disposal from March 2019 onwards.’ 

That means the Hamburg-headquartered company will come to a definitive end.

Hansa’s owner private equity fund Oaktree Capital dropped the shipping company after one of its vessels was arrested over unpaid bunker bills. Oaktree had been looking to sell the loss-making company for quite some time already. Hansa Heavy Lift officially filed for insolvency December 11th, which led to another five vessels being arrested worldwide.

In the wake of Hansa’s insolvency, analist Susan Oatway, senior analist for the MPV and heavy lift market at Drewry, asked if maybe Hansa was too specialised. Now that the oil and gas market is virtually in standstill, demand for premium project carriers has been extremely low.

Although the liquidation process officially start on the 1st of March, the company has already offloaded five vessels which were sold to Dutch MPV-operator Spliethoff, which also owns Hansa’s competitor BigLift Shipping.

The company had been able to sell the ships and sidestep the insolvency administrator, because the vessels were owned by separate entities that are not tied to Hansa Heavy Lift Gmbh, Shippingwatch reports. The same applies to the nine vessel still listed on the company’s website.