Ocean Rig Withdraws Winding Up Petition
Ocean Rig UDW Inc., an international contractor of offshore deepwater drilling services, has announced that pursuant to an order of the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands Simon Appell of AlixPartners Services UK LLP and Eleanor Fisher of Kalo (Cayman) (formerly AlixPartners) have been discharged as joint provisional liquidators of the Company and its subsidiaries.
The subsidiariesare Drill Rigs Holdings Inc. (DRH), Drillships Financing Holding Inc. (DFH), and Drillships Ocean Ventures Inc., (DOV) and together with UDW, DRH and DFH, the Scheme Companies.
Accordingly, the petitions to wind up the Scheme Companies have been withdrawn.
As previously announced by the Company, the schemes of arrangement proposed by the Scheme Companies became fully effective on September 22, 2017.
As a result of the Schemes, the Ocean Rig Group has been substantially deleveraged through an exchange of approximately $3.7 billion principal amount of debt for (i) new equity of the Company, (ii) approximately $288 million of cash, and (iii) $450 million of new secured debt.
Meanwhile, Moody's Investors Service, upgraded Ocean Rig Corporate Family Rating (CFR) to Caa1 from Ca and Probability of Default Rating (PDR) to Caa1-PD from D-PD.
Moody's also assigned a Caa1 rating to the new $450 million senior secured facility jointly issued by DFH, DRH, DOV and several other holding companies owning the rigs.
The upgrade of the CFR to Caa1 from Ca reflects the successful completion of the debt restructuring process on 22nd September 2017, after all the conditions pre-requisite for the restructuring were satisfied.
Ocean Rig is an international offshore drilling contractor providing oilfield services for offshore oil and gas exploration, development and production drilling, and specializing in the ultra-deepwater and harsh-environment segment of the offshore drilling industry.
