Saudi Arabia on Sunday pledged $10 million to help prevent an aging Yemeni oil tanker from unleashing a potential spill in the Red Sea bordering its waters.

The decaying 45-year-old oil tanker known as the FSO Safer, long used as a floating storage platform, is now abandoned off the Yemeni port of Hodeida.

The tanker, which lies some 150 kilometers south of the border with Saudi Arabia, is in "imminent" danger of breaking up, the United Nations warned last month.