Former shadow tanker Bella 1 reaches Chattogram breakers as Russian claimant fights US sale

The VLCC Era, seized by the United States in January under the name Bella 1, arrived at Chattogram for scrapping on 4 November. The 2002-built, 333-metre tanker carried eight names in her career, including Marinera, the name she took during her flight from the US Coast Guard. Her last registered owner was the cash buyer GMS, with technical and demolition-voyage management by Mumbai-based Blue Whale Maritime. She had stopped transmitting AIS positions in mid-October. Market estimates put the US sale at about $205 per light displacement tonne, against the $535 per ldt that tankers are currently fetching in Bangladesh.

Her arrival prompted new filings in a US federal court. Lawyers for Burevestmarin, a Russian company that says it bought the ship on 17 December 2025, disclosed on 4 November that GMS had resold her on 14 October to a Bangladeshi recycler for $20,763,062.25. The court had been told in August that the US sold the tanker under an April order for $9.1m, leaving just under $8.1m after more than $1m of sale costs.

Why is the sale contested?

Burevestmarin calls the US sale "economically irrational" and says it was carried out "behind closed doors". It argues that the resale contradicts earlier US statements that GMS was not licensed to transfer ownership and would keep the ship while she was broken up, and that the government told the court at different times that she would be scrapped in India or in Bangladesh. The company says the ship was sold at half her scrap value and is worth more as a trading tanker. It has asked the court to stop any transfer by GMS to a third party and to order the ship preserved until the validity of the sale order is decided. The court ordered the Justice Department to respond by the morning of 6 November.

The US position is that the tanker carried Venezuelan and Iranian oil in breach of sanctions from at least 2023, and that she was stopped in January because she was sailing without a valid flag, claiming a Guyanese registry that the authorities did not recognise. It refuses to recognise the sale to Burevestmarin or the attempt to register the ship in Russia during the pursuit, and its March filing names a Turkish company as owner. The government says Burevestmarin waited months to file, comes to court with "unclean hands" over its role in the ship's movements while she ignored Coast Guard orders, and points to a March 2026 email from its representatives demanding that the towing company return the ship to Russia.

How did the chase end?

The Coast Guard intercepted Bella 1 off Venezuela in December 2025. She fled across the Atlantic, was renamed Marinera and reflagged to Russia during the pursuit, and was seized in the North Atlantic on 7 January 2026 before being taken to Scotland. In June her former master, Avtandil Kalandadze, pleaded guilty in Washington to failing to obey an order to heave to. US authorities say that under his command, from September to late December 2025, the tanker moved about 1.8 million barrels of Iranian-origin oil to Asia while switching off AIS and concealing her name during ship-to-ship transfers.

This story is part of the Maritime Briefing of 9 November 2026.