Unfinished behemoth ship destined for scrap
An unfinished mega-liner, Global Dream II, which was expected to become one of the world’s largest vessels, will be sold for scrap after its owner, company Genting Hong Kong, went bust.
The bankruptcy administration is now seeking to try and resell some of the vessel’s systems and its engines, German cruise industry magazine An Bord reported, citing insolvency administrator Christoph Morgen. The ship’s unfinished hull, complete only in the lower area, will be sold for scrap afterwards.
The insolvency administration is now more focused on the vessel’s sister ship, the Global Dream, which is currently stuck at the MV Werften shipyard in Wismar on Germany’s Baltic coast. The shipyard went bust early this year and was procured by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The company is expected to use the facility to build naval vessels, including submarines.
The behemoth cruise ship is some 80% complete and seaworthy, thus it can be tugged “anywhere” across the globe, according to the bankruptcy administration. So far, however, the administration has failed to find any buyers for the vessel. Stena, a shipping company based in Sweden, was reportedly eyeing the purchase, but the potential deal fell apart back in May.
“We had several serious buyers for the ship. In the end, the talks focused on an interested party who wanted to take over and operate the ship together with the other ships from the Genting shipping company,” Morgen said back then.
Should the administration fail to find a new owner for the massive vessel “in the coming weeks,” it might end up in a scrap yard like its ill-fated sister ship, An Bord suggested. The Global-class cruise ships were destined to become some of the world’s largest in terms of size, measuring about 208,000 gross tonnage. The vessels were expected to be able to take more than 9,000 passengers aboard, potentially becoming the largest ones in that respect.
The cruise industry has been heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with multiple lines going bust due to the impact of Covid-19 and the restrictions imposed on travel worldwide. Massive cruise vessels were hotbeds for the virus at the start of the pandemic, with both passengers and crew members contracting the disease en-masse in the confined environments of seafaring vessels, which repeatedly became stranded offshore due to outbreaks.
