While many of the luxury superyachts owned by Russia’s billionaires are still anchored at the holiday hotspots in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, more than a dozen are reported to be on their way to or had already arrived at remote ports in small nations such as the Maldives and Montenegro, to escape Western sanctions. Three are moored in Dubai, where many wealthy Russians have vacation homes, according to an AP report.
Another three had gone dark, their transponders last pinging just outside the Bosporus in Turkey — gateway to the Black Sea and the southern Russian ports of Sochi and Novorossiysk.
Graceful a German-built Russian-flagged superyacht believed to belong to Putin, left a repair yard in Hamburg on Feb. 7, two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. It is now moored in the Russian Baltic port of Kaliningrad, beyond the reach of Western sanctions imposed against him this past week.
French authorities seized the superyacht Amore Vero on Thursday in the Mediterranean resort town of La Ciotat. The boat is believed to belong to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, which has been on the U.S. sanctions list since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The French Finance Ministry said in a statement that customs authorities boarded the 289-foot Amore Vero and discovered its crew was preparing for an urgent departure, even though planned repair work wasn’t finished. The $120 million boat is registered to a company that lists Sechin as its primary shareholder.
Since Friday, Italy has seized 143 million euros ($156 million) in luxury yachts and villas in some of its most picturesque destinations, including Sardinia, the Ligurian coast and Lake Como.
On Saturday, superyacht Lena was seized by Italian police in the port of San Remo. Authorities said the boat belongs to Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch close to Putin and among those sanctioned by the European Union. He is the founder of the Volga group and his estimated net worth is reported to be $16.2 billion.
The 213-foot Lady M was also seized in Italy’s Riviera port town of Imperia. In a tweet announcing the seizure on Friday, a spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said the comparatively modest $27 million vessel was the property of sanctioned steel baron Alexei Mordashov, listed as Russia’s wealthiest man with a fortune of about $30 billion.
But Mordashov’s upsized yacht, the 464-foot Nord, was safely at anchor on Friday in Seychelles in the Indian Ocean which is not under the jurisdiction of U.S. or EU sanctions. Among the world’s biggest superyachts, Nord has a market value of $500 million.
Most of the Russians on the annual Forbes list of billionaires have not yet been sanctioned by the United States and its allies, and their superyachts are still cruising the world’s oceans, according to the AP report.
The Russian billionaires have made their fortunes in the decade after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, as state oil and metals industries were sold off at rock-bottom prices.
They have splurged on buying luxury yachts similar in size and expense to those owned by Silicon Valley billionaires and these have emerged as a status symbol in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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