In 2021, Capital Ship Management was presented with an honourable mention at the Tanker Shipping & Trade Awards after its tanker Aristofanis rescued 150 people.
Capital Ship Management’s Aframax tanker Aristofanis alerted the Hellenic (Greek) Coast Guard after encountering a vessel laden with 150 people and which was reportedly taking on water 70 nautical miles southwest of the Messinian island of Schiza in the prefecture of Messinia, in Greece’s Peloponnese region.
The coast guard said it attended the scene and began a search and rescue operation, dispatching a patrol boat, Navy helicopter and an Air Force helicopter to aid in the search operation for a woman reported by one of Aristofanis’ crew to have been seen falling from the wooden ship into the sea as the boat’s passengers were being transferred on board Aristofanis.
The search was co-ordinated by the Joint Search and Rescue Centre at the Hellenic Coast Guard Headquarters, and in its initial report, the coast guard said the search had been unsuccessful but was ongoing.
The passengers reportedly were later transported to the port of Palaiochora on the Greek island of Crete, disembarking on 25 September.
The coast guard said there was no immediate information on their nationalities, or where they had set sail from or were heading.
On 26 September 2021, the Coast Guard said the Port Authority of Chania, in Crete, had arrested a 33-year-old, non-Greek national on suspicion of being a trafficker; a preliminary investigation is ongoing. The status of the missing woman remains unknown.
Aristofanis is a vessel controlled by companies associated with Evangelos Marinakis, who founded Capital Maritime & Trading Corp. Mr Marinakis served as founder and chairman of the maritime company Capital Product Partners LP, whose shares are traded on the American Stock Exchange, and founder and CEO of NYSE-listed Crude Carriers Corp, until its merger with CPLP in 2011.
In 2018, the Capital Group entered the LNG segment, ordering four 174,000 cbm X-DF LNG carriers between 2020 – 2021 from Hyundai H.I. (S. Korea). In March 2019, Capital Product Partners L.P. (CPLP) announced the spin off and merger of its tanker fleet with Diamond S Shipping Inc (NYSE:DSSI) thus creating one of the largest listed tanker companies in the world, in a transaction valued at US$1.65Bn.
In October 2021, the CPLP Holdings bond started trading in the Athens Stock exchange. The five-year senior unsecured bond issue drew EUR150M with record level bidding demand which amounted to EUR801.37M; an overrun of the issue by 5.3 times with very significant interest from private and institutional investors.
Mr Marinakis has many interests outside of shipping, including actively supporting UNICEF, the ’Miltiadis Marinakis Professorship for Modern Greek Language and Culture’ at the Ohio State University. He is well-known for his love of football, and he has owned Greek club Olympiacos FC and now English Premier League club, Nottingham Forest FC.
