The United States Embassy in Manila on Thursday confirmed the presence of a US commercial tanker in the Philippines, which Senator Imee Marcos believed to be transferring 39 million gallons of fuel from a military facility in Hawaii to the country.
“We can confirm that the Yosemite Trader, a commercial tanker, is currently in the vicinity of Subic Bay, Philippines in order to transfer clean fuel from the US military facility at Red Hill, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to a commercial storage facility at Subic Bay,” Kanishka Gangopadhyay, the embassy’s spokesman, said in a statement.
Gangopadhyay corroborated the statement of Marcos, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who was the first to reveal the presence of the oil tanker in the country.
The lady senator raised suspicion about the presence of the tanker, saying it might be a prepositioning of the US’ military supplies in the country in case of a war in the South China Sea.
