International Seaways Brand Guidelines: The 2016 OSG Spin-Off That Merged With Diamond S

A young company with a 1948 parent.

International Seaways is a young company with an old parent. It was created from Overseas Shipholding Group, or OSG, an American tanker owner founded in 1948. English Wikipedia says that in 1969, under Raphael Recanati, OSG began acquiring tankers to carry oil from Alaska to the lower 48 U.S. states, and that in the 1990s it also bought cruise ships.

OSG’s difficulties set up the split. English Wikipedia says the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012 after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused its then chief executive and chief financial officer of falsifying financial statements, and that OSG settled the SEC’s allegations in 2017. In 2016, as part of its restructuring, OSG spun off its large international fleet and business so that it could concentrate on its U.S.-flag trade, Wikipedia says. The international activities and ships went into a new company, International Seaways, Inc., based in New York and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “INSW.”

The two companies then went separate ways. OSG stayed with the U.S. domestic trade and was bought by the Seattle transport group Saltchuk, leaving the New York Stock Exchange in July 2024, according to Wikipedia. International Seaways has been led by Lois Zabrocky, its president and chief executive, with Jeffrey Pribor as chief financial officer; when the Diamond S merger was announced in 2021, gCaptain reported that both would stay in post alongside the chairman, Douglas Wheat.

Crude and products, VLCCs to MRs.

International Seaways owns both crude tankers and product tankers rather than specialising in one. Its fleet has grown mainly by buying other owners’ ships. In June 2018 it completed the purchase of six 300,000-deadweight-tonne VLCCs, very large crude carriers, from Euronav, MarineLink reported.

Its biggest deal came in 2021. On 31 March that year it agreed an all-stock merger with Diamond S Shipping, another New York-listed tanker owner, gCaptain reported, with a combined board of seven International Seaways directors and three from Diamond S, and more than 2,200 employees between the two companies. The merger was completed in July 2021, and the combined company kept the International Seaways name and the INSW ticker, MarineLink reported on 19 July. International Seaways shareholders held about 55.75% of the combined company and former Diamond S holders about 44.25%.

The company said at the time that it had become the second-largest U.S.-listed tanker company by vessel count, with more than 100 ships, and the third-largest by deadweight, at about 11.3 million tonnes. The merger, it said, gave it “power alleys” in large crude tankers, the VLCC and Suezmax classes, and in the LR1, Panamax and MR product tanker classes. One of its ships, pictured in MarineLink’s report, is the tanker Seaways Montauk.

Its shareholder register has seen a public contest. In May 2023 Seatankers, the investment company of the Norwegian shipowner John Fredriksen, published an open letter saying it would withhold its votes for two directors, including Zabrocky, at the annual meeting; International Seaways called the letter’s statements misleading, Bloomberg reported in a story carried by gCaptain.

How tanker owners present themselves.

A tanker or dry-bulk owner sells a service rather than a product, so its identity has to live on its ships and in its paperwork. The oldest signs are the funnel mark and the house flag, painted or flown on every vessel the company operates; today the same hull in company livery is more often seen in an aerial photograph taken from a drone, the ship shown loaded and under way, filling the first screen of a corporate website.

Behind that picture sits the fleet list. Owners publish their ships by class and by name, from the very large crude carriers and Suezmax tankers of the crude trade to Capesize and smaller bulk carriers. Frontline’s home page, for example, counts its VLCCs, Suezmaxes and LR2/Aframax tankers, while CMB.TECH groups its ships under division names such as Euronav for oil tankers and Bocimar for dry bulk. Vessel names can run in a family too: Bocimar’s ships usually carry the prefix Mineral, English Wikipedia says.

Most owners also give space to crew welfare and safety, to environmental reporting and to the next generation of ships. Newbuilding and fuel announcements carry much of the story: CMB.TECH, for one, uses the slogan “Decarbonise Today, Navigate Tomorrow” and in 2026 presented a dry-bulk ship it describes as ammonia-powered, while Frontline’s 2026 fleet-renewal deal was framed around scrubber-fitted “ECO” newbuildings.

Because so many of these companies are listed in New York, Oslo or Brussels, the investor-relations section often does the heaviest lifting: quarterly results, presentations, dividend histories and charts of freight rates. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it was founded, who controls it and what became of its name — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Tankers International, Bruton and new VLCCs.

In 2026 the company grew again in crude. In January it took sole ownership of Tankers International, a VLCC pool founded in 2000 to manage independent owners’ ships commercially, with offices in London, New York and Singapore, and set up a new pool for Suezmaxes alongside it. Under the pool’s model its team runs operations while each pool member has an equal vote, and gCaptain wrote that Tankers International was the first to pool vessels at scale. Zabrocky said the relationship dated back more than 25 years, gCaptain reported on 27 January 2026.

On 15 October 2026 International Seaways announced agreements to acquire Bruton Limited, a Bermuda company listed in Oslo that owned four VLCCs including newbuildings, first by exchanging shares with holders of about 50.5% of Bruton and then by a merger put to a Bruton shareholder meeting at the end of October; at the time it described its own fleet as about 70 vessels across the crude and product segments, The Maritime Executive reported. In its third-quarter results of November 2026, reported by Shipping Herald on 6 November, the company said it had acquired Bruton and its four newbuilding VLCCs, and that it had taken delivery of two new LR1 tankers, with four more due in the second half of 2028. Zabrocky noted in the same release that the company was approaching its tenth anniversary.

The company describes itself as “one of the largest tanker companies worldwide providing energy transportation services for crude oil and petroleum products,” wording it uses at the top of its press releases.

For a design guide, International Seaways shows how a spin-off builds a name of its own: a plain descriptive title, a ticker carried through mergers and a name shared with its ships. Compare Euronav, which sold it six VLCCs, and Scorpio Tankers, another New York-listed tanker owner. For this guide we use teal, pale sea and a hull red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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