“We have no comment to make, but we will return with explanations at the beginning of next week. There is no mistake,” says Ionut Zeche, one of the managers of Vantage Driller Roco, the company that operated the highest capital increase in Romania last year, RON3.25 billion.
According to publicly available data, the explanation for this capital increase is the transfer of a drillship, Titanium Explorer, from a Polish branch of Vantage to the company in Romania, Vantage Driller Roco.
Vantage Driller Roco is a business controlled by a Cyprus-based company, Vantage Holdings Cyprus ODC Limited and is part of the US Vantage group, registered in the Cayman Islands.
Vantage has a fleet of four jackups and four drillships, one of which is now under construction. Its oldest such asset has been in operation since 2008. It takes at least $200 million to build a small offshore rig and as much as over $1 billion for deepwater drilling rigs. A late 2013 corporate report shows Vantage had contracts with Petrobras, Total (Congo) and ONGC, an Indian oil and gas company, which used its rigs.
In the spring of 2012, Vantage Drilling announced its subsidiary Vantage Drilling Poland had completed the acquisition of an ultra deepwater drillship, Titanium Explorer, previously named Dragonquest, via a Luxembourg branch, according to a corporate release cited by Reuters.
Titanium Explorer was worth 2.94 billion Polish zlotys ($911 million) in September 2013, according to the Official Gazette. The drillship was then transferred to Vantage Driller Roco and the transfer was registered with the Trade Registry as a capital increase of RON3.258 billion (EUR728 million or $840 million) in late 2014.
Vantage officials in Houston did not return ZF’s calls for comment.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)