You heard the one about Scorpio Tankers booking an MR for $85,000 per day in the Atlantic Basin?

That’s old news now, as the New York-listed clean product goliath says it nearly doubled that heady rate on a fixture at the weekend.

Scorpio’s latest coup in a spate of US Gulf export cargoes came as it booked the 49,900-dwt STI Esles II (built 2018) for a whopping time charter equivalent rate of $166,000 per day from the gulf to the west coast of Ecuador, which typically would involve a transit of the Panama Canal.