Vishal Cruises Pvt. Ltd

Vishal Cruises Pvt. Ltd. had its address at the time in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius, according to a court notice. On 10 February 2022, the Commercial Court of Rijeka listed the company as a debtor in proceedings in which a monetary claim was to be satisfied through the sale of the motor vessel Delphin. The notice identified the Delphin as the company’s property; at the time, the ship was at the Viktor Lenac shipyard in Rijeka.

The Delphin: use and sale proceedings in 2022

The court scheduled the public auction for 10 a.m. on 4 March 2022 at its premises in Rijeka. There were 22 days between the notice and the auction. The order valued the ship at 22,110,000 kuna; the lowest permissible bid was 11,060,000 kuna, and the security deposit was 2,211,000 kuna. The deposit was required to participate; bidders had to submit proof of payment to the court no later than 24 hours before the auction. The minimum bid was about half the appraised value, while the deposit was ten percent of that value. A contemporaneous industry report counted seven interested companies, five of which were admitted to bid.

The MS Delphin was built in 1975 as a Soviet cruise ferry and later operated in the German market under the Hansa and Passat brands. It was designed to carry 470 passengers. From 2015 to 2017, the ship served as a floating hotel for shipyard workers and crews at the Viktor Lenac shipyard. The Argentinian startup Alteza Cruises then selected the Delphin as its first charter vessel. A year-round South America program was planned to begin in 2018, but it never got off the ground, and the ship remained laid up in Croatia.

In April 2022, the Delphin was beached at Aliaga on the Turkish coast for scrapping. Rijeka lies at the northern edge of the protected Bay of Rijeka, the northernmost part of the Kvarner Gulf, between the island of Krk, Istria, and the northern Croatian mainland. The bay is connected to the Kvarner Gulf by channels; geographically, the port area is part of the Adriatic.