Shipbuilder STX France said yesterday it had found a buyer for a massive €510 million cruise liner ordered by Libya before the bloody downfall of the Gaddafi regime.

Swiss-Italian operator MSC Cruises will take delivery of the 140,000-tonne giant – the largest cruise ship ever ordered by a European operator – in March next year, the firms said at a joint news conference in Paris.

The 333-metre ship is longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall and can house 4,335 passengers and 1,388 crew in 1,751 cabins. Geneva-based MSC has decided to call her the MSC Preziosa.

She was initially ordered in 2010 by the Libyan state shipping firm GNMTC, but payments to STX ended during last year’s Libyan revolution, when Gaddafi’s 42-year-old regime was overthrown by Nato air power and popular militias.

STX France, which is two-thirds owned by a European subsidiary of South Korea’s STX Shipbuilding and one-third by the French state, was forced to seek another buyer and quickly entered negotiations with MSC Cruises.

MSC already owns the Preziosa’s sister ship the Divina, which will go into service in May from the French port of Marseille, and 11 other vessels, 10 of them French built but all flying the Panama flag.