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16 superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs

Western sanctions over moscow's invasion of ukraine led to many luxury vessels being detained in europe.

Two superyachts linked to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich were spotted on the Turkish coast on Tuesday, 'Eclipse' and 'My Solaris'. Mr Abramovich is among several wealthy Russians added to an EU blacklist as governments act to seize their yachts and other luxury assets. AP

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Several luxury yachts owned by wealthy Russians have been detained across Europe this month.

It comes after the West imposed sanctions on oligarchs over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine .

Some have taken evasive action – two such superyachts linked to billionaire Roman Abramovich were spotted approaching the Turkish coast on Tuesday. A group of Ukrainians tried to stop one of the yachts from docking in Turkey.

Chelsea FC owner Mr Abramovich is one of several oligarchs who were added to an EU blacklist last week as governments acted to seize yachts and other luxury assets owned by the billionaires.

Western sanctions resulted in many large vessels relocating from Europe in the past few weeks. Several have headed to places such as the Maldives, which have no extradition treaty with the US.

Where is the Abramovich-owned yacht heading?

Mr Abramovich's yacht Eclipse was seen heading towards Marmaris on Tuesday, according to data compiled by monitoring site Marine Traffic, which was seen by Reuters.

The previous day, his superyacht Solaris was moored in Bodrum, about 80 kilometres from Marmaris, data showed, after skirting waters of EU countries.

There was no suggestion Mr Abramovich was on board either of the yachts.

Ukrainians attempt to stop Abramovich's yacht docking in Turkey

Which yachts have been detained?

On Monday, a superyacht linked to another Russian billionaire was detained by authorities after docking in Gibraltar.

The Axioma , believed to belong to Dmitrievich Pumpyansky, moored at Gibraltar on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Reuters TV footage showed.

Mr Pumpyansky, who is under UK and EU sanctions, owns Russia's largest steel pipe maker TMK. Data shows the 72-metre vessel is owned by a British Virgin Islands holding company called Pyrene investments, Reuters reported. An article published as part of the Panama Papers leaks names Mr Pumpyansky as a beneficiary of the holding.

On March 12, the world's biggest sailing yacht, called Sailing Yacht A and owned by Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko , was seized by Italian police.

Several other luxury yachts have also been detained across Europe, including in Gibraltar, Mallorca in Spain's Balearic Islands and the French coast.

Here are 16 superyachts linked to wealthy Russians

1. Eclipse , a superyacht linked to sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich , was this week spotted heading in the direction of Marmaris in Turkey.

2. Solaris , belonging to Mr Abramovich , moored in Bodrum at the start of the week.

3. The Axioma superyacht, belonging to Russian oligarch Dmitrievich Pumpyansky , who is on the EU's list of sanctioned Russians, was detained by authorities after docking in Gibraltar on Monday.

4. The Crescent , which was seized by the Spanish government in Tarragona, Spain, on March 17. The ship's owner is not publicly known, although it is believed to belong to Russian Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft Oil in Moscow.

5. Ragnar , owned by former KGB officer and Russian oligarch Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, who is not on the EU sanctions list.

6. Tango , owned by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who was sanctioned by the US on March 11.

7. Lady Anastasia , owned by Russian arms manufacturer Alexander Mijeev, is retained at Port Adriano, Mallorca, as a result of sanctions against Russia and Belarus issued by the European Union.

8. Valerie was seized by the Spanish government in Barcelona, Spain, on March 15. Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that the ship is linked to Rostec State Corporation’s chief executive Sergey Chemezov.

9. The $578 million Sailing Yacht A owned by Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko was seized by Italian police in the port of Trieste on March 12.

10. The 156-metre Dilbar superyacht is owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov.

11. La Datcha belongs to Russian billionaire businessman Oleg Tinkov.

12. Lady M , owned by Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov, was seized by Italian police on March 5.

13. Amore Vero was seized in the Mediterranean resort of La Ciotat on March 3 by French authorities. The yacht is linked to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs the Russian oil giant Rosneft.

14. Quantum Blue , owned by a company linked to Russian billionaire Sergei Galitsky, the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft, was seized in southern France on March 3.

15. Superyacht Luna is owned by Russian billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov.

16. Triple Seven is owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Abramov, according to media reports. The yacht was last up for sale in 2020 for €38 million ($41.85 million).

Where are the oligarchs’ yachts?

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The Middlemen at the Heart of an Oligarch-Industrial Complex

They oversee the flow of billions of dollars from Putin-connected Russians to companies involved in superyachts and villas. They’ve drawn the attention of a U.S. task force.

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By Michael Forsythe ,  Gaia Pianigiani and Julian E. Barnes

• June 1, 2022

On Feb. 24, as Russian troops poured into Ukraine on Day 1 of the invasion, an employee of a yacht management company sent an email to the captain of the Amadea, a $325 million superyacht: “Importance: High.”

The family of a Russian oligarch under sanctions had spent much of January and February cruising from island to island in the Caribbean and had some questions and concerns. When would be a good time to visit New Zealand? Bali? Could the yacht get a special boat to pull water skiers? And would the staff of the Amadea please stop folding napkins in triangles? “Guests don’t like it,” wrote the employee, Victoria Pastukhova, a “client coordinator” for the company, Imperial Yachts.

At Imperial Yachts, no detail is too small to sweat. Based in Monaco, with a staff of about 100 — plus 1,200 to 1,500 crew members aboard yachts — the company caters to oligarchs whose fortunes turn on the decisions of President Vladimir V. Putin. Imperial Yachts and its Moscow-born founder, Evgeniy Kochman, have prospered by fulfilling their clients’ desires to own massive luxury ships.

For a Russian with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, Mr. Kochman’s company takes care of everything: It oversees construction, hires the crew, manages the vessel’s day-to-day operation and can charter the ship or sell it, if need be. Another company also run by Mr. Kochman, BLD Management , performs a similar service for villas.

Imperial’s rise has benefited an array of businesses across Europe, including German shipbuilders, Italian carpenters, French interior design firms and Spanish marinas , which together employ thousands of people. Imperial Yachts is at the center of what is essentially an oligarch-industrial complex, overseeing the flow of billions of dollars from politically connected Russians to that network of companies, according to interviews, court documents and intelligence reports.

Imperial Yachts and BLD are now under scrutiny by a U.S. government task force, called KleptoCapture, that is trying to disrupt the Russian war machine by going after the assets of oligarchs tied to Mr. Putin. After some high-profile raids and seizures, the Americans are focusing on the network of enablers working outside of Russia. Investigators from the F.B.I., the Treasury and several intelligence agencies are gathering evidence showing that businesses and individuals knowingly aided Russians under sanctions whose wealth came through corruption, making them vulnerable to U.S. charges.

Andrew Adams, a federal prosecutor leading the task force, said in an interview that “targeting people who make their living by providing a means for money laundering is a key priority.”

Documents obtained from the Amadea by U.S. officials show the role Imperial Yachts plays in managing the myriad requests of stunningly rich, seaborne Russians. The Amadea is now in Fiji, where American officials are fighting a court battle to take possession of the yacht. Mr. Adams said that Russian superyachts that don’t find a buyer may be sold to salvagers for their pricey fittings: gold-plated bathroom fixtures , marble, inlaid floors made of rare wood.

In pursuing the enablers, American and European investigators have confronted a deliberately confusing ownership structure involving daisy chains of shell companies stretching from the Marshall Islands to Switzerland. Along with the Amadea, Imperial Yachts oversaw the construction of the Scheherazade, a $700 million superyacht that U.S. officials say is linked to Mr. Putin, and the Crescent, which the Spanish police believe is owned by Igor Sechin, chairman of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft.

A secret U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that the money to build the ships came from a group of investors led by Gennady Timchenko, a confidant of Mr. Putin and one of Russia’s richest men, who, like Mr. Sechin, has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014. Mr. Timchenko and his partners designed the Scheherazade — seized in early May by the Italian police — as a gift for Mr. Putin’s use, according to the assessment. Together, the three vessels may have cost as much as $1.6 billion, enough to buy six new frigates for the Russian navy.

Simon Clark, a lawyer for Imperial Yachts, said that the company “is unaware of any connection between our business and Mr. Timchenko. However, we are in the yacht-building business; we are not involved in our clients’ financial affairs.” Mr. Clark added that the company has “never conducted business or provided services to any parties subject to international sanctions.”

But U.S. officials are not buying such explanations. Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, said it was the responsibility of people in the yacht services industry to avoid doing business with people under sanctions.

“And if you do,” she said, “you yourself will be subject to sanctions.”

Courting Russia’s Wealthiest

Mr. Kochman, 41, got his start in the yacht business in Russia in 2001, the year after Mr. Putin took power, selling Italian-made yachts . Russia had been through a decade of turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many of today’s oligarchs had yet to amass their billions. But Mr. Kochman, then just 20 years old, had plenty of millionaires to court.

As some well-connected Russians joined the ranks of the world’s wealthiest people and began to buy up villas on the French and Italian Rivieras, Mr. Kochman moved to Monaco. Instead of selling mere yachts, often made on a production line, Mr. Kochman and his sister, Julia Stewart, now 46, entered into the world of superyachts, custom-made vessels of about 100 feet or longer. “We grow with our clients like parents with babies,” he said in 2016 in a rare interview .

Company records in Monaco show that Imperial Yachts was set up in 2008. The business also registered that year in the secrecy haven of Jersey in the English Channel.

But Mr. Kochman was still spending a lot of time in Moscow. That year he attended an exhibition for the ultrawealthy, with one of his British-built yachts on display. “We buy your yachts and you buy our gas,” Mr. Kochman told a Guardian reporter. Soon, his business took off.

Rich Russians and Persian Gulf royalty now dominate the ranks of owners of the world’s most extravagant superyachts, which can cost up to $75 million a year to operate . Since 2010, 17 superyachts 400 feet or longer have been delivered; all are owned by Russians or members of the Gulf monarchies.

In about 2014, Imperial Yachts landed its biggest project to date, a 349-foot superyacht to be constructed by Lürssen, a German shipbuilder: This would become the Amadea. Its Russian owner was sparing no expense, with hand-painted Michelangelo-style clouds above the dining table, a lobster tank, a fire pit and, at the bow, a five-ton stainless-steel Art Deco albatross figurehead . Nick Flashman, a former yacht captain who had joined Imperial, oversaw the project. Zuretti, a French firm, did the interior design.

Sébastien Gey, the director at Zuretti, said in an interview that the yacht’s owner — whom he declined to name because of nondisclosure agreements — was deeply involved in its design and construction, making frequent visits as the ship was built and outfitted. It was delivered in 2017.

But even before it was finished, the owner had Lürssen build another, larger superyacht, the Crescent, delivered in 2018, followed by the even bigger 459-foot Scheherazade, which went into service in 2020. Most of the planning and details for those two vessels were left to Mr. Kochman, recalled Mr. Gey.

That, Mr. Flashman said, was not unusual. “The client may be fully immersed in the project, he might not be,” he said in a phone interview. “I channel everything through Mr. Kochman.”

While Imperial Yachts oversees the projects, Lürssen, based in Bremen, receives payments directly from yacht owners, a company spokesman said. Lürssen is following “all sanctions and associated laws,” he added.

“We are not currently working with anyone on the sanctions list and we have shared all requested information with the authorities, with whom we continue to work,” the spokesman said in an email.

Mr. Gey, from the French design firm, said it does not work with people under sanctions.

The owner of all three vessels — at least on paper — was Eduard Khudainatov, a onetime pig breeder who is a protégé of Mr. Sechin, according to interviews with two people with direct knowledge of his role. Documents filed in a Fiji court show Mr. Khudainatov’s ownership of two of them. He was president of Rosneft when Mr. Sechin served as deputy prime minister. After stepping down from that post in 2013, he began buying up oil companies.

In 2020 Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet, citing an unnamed acquaintance, described him as a compliant and agreeable lieutenant: “Khudainatov knew how to give the impression of a simpleton, which is why he managed to please many bosses and make a career.”

Mr. Khudainatov, 61, had another appealing quality: Unlike Mr. Sechin or Mr. Timchenko, he was not under any sanctions.

But according to U.S. investigators, Imperial Yachts brokered the sale of the Amadea late last year to Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian government official and billionaire investor who has been on the U.S. sanctions list since 2018. He was among a group of seven oligarchs who the American officials said “benefit from the Putin regime and play a key role in advancing Russia’s malign activities.”

Showing that he was the new owner was key in what so far appears to be a successful effort by U.S. officials to persuade a Fijian court that the Amadea could be seized. The ship may leave this week. But in arguing its case, the U.S. investigators lacked official documents showing that Mr. Kerimov was the owner. Feizal Haniff, a lawyer in Fiji, disputed the U.S. claims, saying that Mr. Khudainatov remains the owner of the Amadea, controlling it through an offshore company.

In an affidavit, Timothy J. Bergen, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that Mr. Khudainatov, who doesn’t appear on lists of Russia’s richest people, was a “clean, unsanctioned straw owner” of the Amadea and the Scheherazade. Mr. Bergen said that Imperial Yachts, referred to as “Company A” in his affidavit, “has a practice of concealing yacht ownership behind nested shell companies” and using stand-ins like Mr. Khudainatov “in order to conceal the true beneficial owner.”

Mr. Clark, the lawyer for Imperial Yachts, said the company “would never knowingly create structures to hide or conceal ownership, nor would we knowingly broker deals to sanctioned individuals.”

Mr. Khudainatov, Mr. Timchenko and Mr. Kerimov didn’t return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

One thing is clear, according to the U.S. task force: Members of Mr. Kerimov’s family were on board the Amadea earlier this year, based on investigators’ interviews with crew members, reviews of emails between the ship and Imperial, and other documents from the superyacht including copies of passports.

On Jan. 21, Mr. Gey, the French designer, received an email from the captain of the Amadea. G2 — Imperial’s code name for Firuza Kerimova, Mr. Kerimov’s wife, according to the affidavit from the F.B.I. agent — was unhappy with the design of the electrical sockets in the guest bathrooms. They were in the cupboards, inconveniencing the family on their Caribbean tour.

The captain had been told of the request by Ms. Pastukhova, the Imperial client coordinator. Mr. Gey booked a flight and a hotel in St. Barts.

A few days later, Imperial Yachts signed off on another request. “Mr. Kochman has granted permission to sail to Antigua,” Ms. Pastukhova wrote to Ms. Kerimova. Mr. Kochman’s approval was also needed for a new onboard pizza oven.

“He wants to have an eye on everything, everything, everything,” Mr. Gey said.

An Italian Downton Abbey

With its colorful homes aging gracefully in the Mediterranean sun, and its harbor holding dinghies in neat rows, Portofino is the archetypal Italian seaside village. Strict conservation laws, in place since the rule of Benito Mussolini, are meant to ensure that it stays that way.

Portofino is a playground of the rich. Superyachts clutter the coast. Last month, Kourtney Kardashian was married there. And these days, a massive construction crane looms over the village, dominating the skyline.

Beneath the crane is Villa Altachiara, a 30-room mansion built in the late 19th century by a British earl. His son, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, sponsored the expedition that discovered the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Some locals believe the villa is cursed. In 2001, its owner, an Italian countess, fell to her death from the steep hill leading to the sea, her body washing up in France.

The name Altachiara is an Italian translation of Highclere , the palatial Carnarvon estate in Hampshire where “Downton Abbey” was filmed.

When the villa, complete with a helipad, a pool and an eight-acre park, was sold in 2015, everyone in Portofino soon knew who the new proprietor was. “Villa Altachiara will speak Russian,” read a headline in the Genoa newspaper. The owner, the paper reported, was Eduard Khudainatov.

The cast of characters restoring Villa Altachiara to its former glory is familiar. Mr. Kochman’s BLD Management is supervising the project. Mr. Gey is helping to oversee the local and international artisans restoring the interior of the mansion. Yachtline 1618 , an Italian high-end carpentry company that has worked on Imperial Yachts projects, is also involved.

It has been seven years since the purchase, and construction was underway this winter, but the work stopped and the crews left at about the time of the Russian incursion into Ukraine, several local residents said. The towering crane remains, along with some green nets meant to help restore the erosion-preventing terracing.

Locals have never seen Mr. Khudainatov. Mariangela Canale, owner of the town’s 111-year-old bakery, said she was worried that Portofino would become a place where the homes were mere investments, owned by wealthy people who rarely visited, and the community would lose its soul. “Even the richest residents have always come for a chat or to buy my focaccia bread with their children, or have dinner in the piazza,” she said. “They live with us.”

Company records indicate that Mr. Kochman got into the villa business years after his yacht business was flourishing. BLD Management was set up in Jersey in 2016 through Fiduchi Group , the same offshore corporate services firm that registered Imperial Yachts. Mr. Kochman owns 5 percent of each company; the rest is hidden by a company called Fiduchi Trustees Limited. Both Mr. Kochman and Fiduchi declined to comment on the shareholding.

Much of BLD’s business is in Russia, especially around the Moscow area where it builds dachas for wealthy Russians, often with interior designs by Zuretti and carpentry by Yachtline 1618. BLD’s website lists a Moscow address and is in English and Russian.

But the idea is the same as with Imperial Yachts: work in total secrecy.

“Everything is under very strict nondisclosure agreements,” Mr. Gey said. “It’s a standard in the industry.”

He added, “It’s not like there is something to hide.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

Michael Forsythe is a reporter on the investigations team. He was previously a correspondent in Hong Kong, covering the intersection of money and politics in China. He has also worked at Bloomberg News and is a United States Navy veteran. More about Michael Forsythe

Gaia Pianigiani is a reporter based in Italy for The New York Times.  More about Gaia Pianigiani

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. More about Julian E. Barnes

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

President Biden and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced that a record number of allies were meeting their military spending commitments  as they sought to present a united front against Russia.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia will visit North Korea  for a meeting with its leader, Kim Jong-un, as the two countries deepen military ties to support Putin’s war in Ukraine with North Korean weapons .

Scores of countries at a two-day summit in Switzerland joined Ukraine in calling for “dialogue between all parties” to end the war , but world leaders were divided on how to engage Russia.

Narrowing Press Freedoms: Journalists in Ukraine say they are subject to increasing restrictions and pressure from the government , adding that the measures go beyond wartime security needs.

Images From the Border: Photographs from two trips along Ukraine’s northeastern border regions, in the months before Russia renewed an offensive there, reveal loss and transformation .

A Russian City Adapts:  While in Moscow the fighting feels far away, residents of Belgorod, 25 miles from the border with Ukraine, have learned to duck for cover when the sirens wail .

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The U.S. seized Russian oligarchs' superyachts. Now, American taxpayers pay the price

Ayesha Rascoe

Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Stephanie Baker, senior writer at Bloomberg News, about the complications involved in seizing and maintaining superyachts owned by sanctioned Russian billionaires.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Amadea, a superyacht, docked at the Port of Everett on Monday, April 29, 2024 in Everett, Washington. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)

How did a Russian oligarch’s seized superyacht end up in Everett?

Worth more than $300 million, the Amadea could soon be up for sale. But first, it came to Everett on Monday.

• Monday, April 29, 2024 1:44pm
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U.S. seizes mega yacht owned by oligarch with close ties to Putin

PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain — The U.S. government seized a mega yacht in Spain owned by an oligarch with close ties to the Russian president on Monday, the first in the government’s sanctions enforcement initiative to “seize and freeze” giant boats and other pricey assets of Russian elites .

Spain’s Civil Guard and U.S. federal agents descended on the yacht at the Marina Real in the port of Palma de Mallorca, the capital of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Associated Press reporters at the scene saw police going in and out of the boat on Monday morning.

The seizure was confirmed by two people familiar with the matter. The people could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. A Spanish Civil Guard spokesman confirmed that officers from the Spanish police body and from the FBI were at the marina searching the vessel Monday morning and said further details would be released later.

A Civil Guard source told The Associated Press that the immobilized yacht is Tango, a 78-meter (254-feet) vessel that carries Cook Islands flag and that  Superyachtfan.com , a specialized website that tracks the world’s largest and most exclusive recreational boats, values at $120 million. The source was also not authorized to be named in media reports and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

The yacht is among the assets linked to Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who heads the Moscow-based Renova Group, a conglomerate encompassing metals, mining, tech and other assets, according to U.S. Treasury Department documents. All of Vekselberg’s assets in the U.S. are frozen and U.S. companies are forbidden from doing business with him and his entities.

The move is the first time the U.S. government has seized an oligarch’s yacht since Attorney General Merrick Garland and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assembled a task force known as REPO — short for Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs — as an effort to enforce sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.

Vekselberg has long had ties to the U.S. including a green card he once held and homes in New York and Connecticut. The Ukrainian-born businessman built his fortune by investing in the aluminum and oil industries in the post-Soviet era.

Vekselberg was also questioned in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and has worked closely with his American cousin, Andrew Intrater, who heads the New York investment management firm Columbus Nova.

Vekselberg and Intrater were thrust into the spotlight in the Mueller probe after the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels released a memo that claimed $500,000 in hush money was routed through Columbus Nova to a shell company set up by Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Columbus Nova denied that Vekselberg played any role in its payments to Cohen.

Vekselberg and Intrater met with Cohen at Trump Tower, one of several meetings between members of Trump’s inner circle and high-level Russians during the 2016 campaign and transition.

The 64-year-old mogul founded Renova Group more than three decades ago. The group holds the largest stake in United Co. Rusal, Russia’s biggest aluminum producer, among other investments.

Vekselberg was first sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018, and again in March of this year, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine began. Vekselberg has also been sanctioned by authorities in the United Kingdom.

The U.S. Justice Department has also launched a sanctions enforcement task force known as KleptoCapture , which also aims to enforce financial restrictions in the U.S. imposed on Russia and its billionaires, working with the FBI, Treasury and other federal agencies. That task force will also target financial institutions and entities that have helped oligarchs move money to dodge sanctions.

The White House has said that many allied countries, including German, the U.K, France, Italy and others are involved in trying to collect and share information against Russians targeted for sanctions. In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden warned oligarch that the U.S. and European allies would “find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets.”

“We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” he said.

Wednesday’s capture is not the first time Spanish authorities have been involved in the seizure of a Russian oligarch’s superyacht. Officials there said they had seized a vessel valued at over $140 million owned by the CEO of a state-owned defense conglomerate and a close Putin ally.

French authorities have also seized superyachts, including one 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.

Italy has also seized several yachts and other assets.

Italian financial police moved quickly seizing the superyacht “Lena” belonging to Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch close to Putin, in the port of San Remo; the 65-meter (215-foot) “Lady M” owned by Alexei Mordashov in nearby Imperia, featuring six suites and estimated to be worth 65 million euros; as well as villas in Tuscany and Como, according to government officials.

Para reported from Madrid and Balsamo reported from Washington.

Watch CBS News

Russian oligarchs moving yachts as U.S. tracks down assets

By Catherine Herridge

March 2, 2022 / 9:19 AM EST / CBS News

Yachts owned by Russian billionaires are on the move as the U.S. and its allies seek to hunt down the assets of Russia's wealthiest in direct response to the invasion of Ukraine . The wealthiest Russian money – including Russian President Vladimir Putin's — has pushed to sea.

Data from MarineTraffic, a global intelligence group, shows yachts owned by oligarchs are on the move, including aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska's $65 million Clio and oil executive Vagit Alekperov's $80 million Galactica Super Nova.

"No self-respecting oligarchy exists without a super yacht. And so what we're seeing now is a hightailing it on the high seas," financier and anti-corruption activist Bill Browder told CBS News. 

A super yacht is typically over 40 meters long. The Clio and Galactica are each over 70 meters long. 

In response to Putin's war against Ukraine, the Biden administration created a task force to go after Russian oligarchs' "yachts, luxury apartments, money and their ability to send their kids to fancy college[s] in the West." 

Browder said the goal is to get the oligarchs to pressure Putin to stop the war. 

"We're not ready to engage in military warfare. And so there's an expression: We should fight them in the banks if we can't fight them with tanks,'" he said. 

Some oligarchs have made statements taking issue with the Russian invasion.

Mikhail Fridman, who founded one of Russia's largest private banks, said he does "not believe that war would be a solution." Evgeny Lebedev — the son of an oligarch, and who owns a London newspaper — wrote an op-ed pleading with Putin to "save the world from annihilation." 

The financial pressure is really about undermining support for Putin, both "among rank-and-file Russians as well as the oligarchs who help control the economy," said John Smith, former director of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces all foreign sanctions.

Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine , the $100 million "Graceful" — believed to be owned by Putin himself— left a German port for safer Russian waters. 

"He's a former KGB agent, and he has worked his entire career to appear on the surface to be the common man — when below the surface, it's apparent that he has significant wealth stored," said Smith.

Former government officials and experts told CBS News that cutting off Putin's revenue from the energy industry is key but this is an area where both the U.S. and its allies are vulnerable. Further disrupting the energy supply could send prices even higher .

• Vladimir Putin

Catherine Herridge is a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence based in Washington, D.C.

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The World’s Most Expensive Yachts—Including Some That Cost Billions

By Brett Berk

Though superyachts are already among the most costly consumer items available, the prices of the most expensive yachts in the world are still astounding. In recent decades, those with money to burn have settled on these floating palaces as an ideal locus for demonstrating their prosperity, and, as such, the global luxury yacht industry is undergoing a golden age. The world’s überwealthy think of their motor yachts as toys, and they’re constantly trying to outdo each other in scale, design, amenities, materials, and sheer profligacy.

Knowing this, what features does it take to own one of the most expensive yachts in existence? And how much do these opulent vessels actually cost? To that end, AD has compiled a list of the five priciest superyachts currently out on the water. As with many things connected to the very wealthy, details are shrouded in secrecy—often intentionally—to shield the assets from taxation or seizure, or to protect privacy.

Below, dive into the five reportedly most expensive yachts in the world.

5. Dubai ($400 million)

This 531-foot yacht is reportedly owned by United Arab Emirates Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai. Though it was originally planned for another Middle Eastern potentate, Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, he suddenly voided the contract in 2001. With exteriors designed by Andrew Winch and interiors by Platinum Yachts, this German-built Blohm + Voss vessel features several Jacuzzis, a pool inlaid with handmade mosaic tiles that is reportedly large enough to hold 115 people, a circular staircase, a discotheque with an appropriately sized dance floor, squash courts, a movie theater, a dining room for 90 guests (the other 25 presumably have to eat in the pool?), a helipad, and a submarine.

4. Topaz ($527 million)

Resembling a stealth bomber, this 483-foot ship is reportedly owned by Russian fertilizer and coal oligarch Andrey Melnichenko. With exteriors by Tim Heywood Design Ltd. and interior designs by Terence Disdale Design, this German-built Lürssen Yacht features a 2,500-square-foot primary bedroom, six guest suites (with moveable walls so they can be transformed into four grand staterooms), glassware and tableware fashioned from French crystal, a helicopter hangar, a 30-foot speedboat tender, and three swimming pools, including one with a glass-bottom dangling menacingly above a disco.

3. Azzam ($600 million)

This 590-foot ship is currently thought to be the largest private yacht in the world and one of the fastest, with a top speed of 35 miles per hour. To achieve this immense scale and speed, it required a pair of gas turbines and two stratospherically potent diesel engines, rendering it very difficult to build. It is reportedly owned by a member of the royal family of the UAE, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. With exteriors by Nauta Yacht and interiors by French decorator Cristophe Leoni, this yacht was also built by Lürssen in Germany. The vessel is set apart by its early 19th-century Empire-style veneered furniture, as well as its state-of-the-art security systems, including a fully bulletproof primary suite and a high-tech missile deterrence capabilities.

2. Eclipse ($1.5 billion)

In addition to being the second-costliest, this 533-footer is thought to be the world’s second-largest private yacht. Owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich , the ship was claimed to be located in Turkey and may be impounded as part of the United Kingdom’s sanctions against Russia. Designed by Terry Disdale and built by Blohm + Voss, it features two-dozen guest cabins, two swimming pools, two helipads, and multiple hot tubs. For privacy and security reasons, it hosts a missile detection system, bulletproof windows in the primary bedroom and on the bridge, an anti-paparazzi shield, and, when all of that fails, a mini-submarine that can take a few VIPs 164 feet under the ocean’s surface.

1. History Supreme ($4.8 billion)

History Supreme has never actually been seen in a major port, and rumors suggest that the yacht may not be real and instead just a publicity stunt. Reportedly owned by Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok, and designed by Stuart Hughes in the UK, the yacht is only a paltry 100 feet long. Its worth is said to be derived from its lavish finishes, including a statue constructed from genuine Tyrannosaurus rex bones, a liquor bottle embedded with an 18.5-carat diamond, and a primary bedroom with one wall made from meteorite and another from a 24-karat gold Aquavista Panoramic Wall Aquarium. If you see it somewhere, let us know.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is Jeff Bezos’s yacht?

This is why people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos work to keep their yachts out of the public eye. Though we are not including Jeff Bezos’s yacht, Koru (Maori for “coil”), in this list because it is a sailing yacht and thus excluded from the realm of these motor yachts, it created controversy in the Netherlands when its presence became known. Jeff Bezos’s abided the $500 million price tag of Oceanco, the Dutch custom yacht builder, to create the 417-foot megayacht. But when the company, at Bezos’s behest, requested that a local bridge be dismantled to make way for its gigantic mast on its journey from the shipyard, public sentiment turned against the cento-billionaire, and Oceano shelved its request. Maybe a port like Monaco would be more accommodating?

Also not on this list is the world’s largest private yacht, reportedly owned by Alisher Usmanov. Though size and cost typically scale in the world of superyachts, this is not always the case (see #1 in this list.) Also, Somnio, the 728-feet dream-monikered yacht liner that tops our list of the world’s largest private yachts , isn’t quite done being constructed. And it is not, like most of the largest superyachts, privately owned by one individual or family—it’s a kind of floating condo, with 39 eight-figure homes available to potential owners solely by invitation.

By Amy Bradford

By Audrey Lee

By Rachel Davies

By Katherine McLaughlin

Doug Chayka

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

What targeting russia’s wayward billionaires revealed about our own..

Tim Murphy January+February 2024 Issue

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When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the  January + February 2024  issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces  here .

For the last 18 months one of the most opulent and unnecessary vessels ever constructed has been floating in a narrow channel next to a jungle gym and a fleet of industrial cranes at the Port of San Diego. Built in Germany, and formerly managed by a firm in Monaco and flagged to the Cayman Islands, the superyacht Amadea is 348 feet long, with a helipad, a swimming pool, two baby grand pianos, and a 5-ton stainless steel art-deco albatross that extends outward from the prow like a bird reenacting Titanic . It can accommodate 16 guests and 36 crew, and costs $1 million a month just to maintain. Who, exactly, has been picking up that tab in the past is a matter of some dispute, tangled up in a web of trusts and LLCs, code names and NDAs, and legal proceedings in two countries. But the ship’s current owner is a bit less ambiguous: Congratulations— it’s you .

The Amadea ended up in California after a family vacation gone wrong. In 2022, after a long summer in Italy and the south of France, the ship refueled in ­Gibraltar and crossed the Atlantic, arriving in the ­Caribbean just in time for Christmas. There, according to emails between the ship’s captain and its management company that were later submitted in court by the Department of Justice, deckhands were to be joined by the children and grandchildren of a wealthy Russian national—four adults, three kids, as well as a coterie of bodyguards and nannies. Crew members were preparing for a cruise to Antigua, a sojourn in Mexico, and a visit to the Galapagos. They had picked up new scuba gear for their rarefied passengers.

But a few weeks into the trip, the Amadea abruptly changed its plans. All large boats, from pleasure craft to container ships, are required by the International Maritime ­Organization to signal their location at regular intervals, except in the case of emergencies. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, the Amadea dropped off the map for days, according to court documents. In Panama, the captain alerted the management company that government inspectors had collected information on the ship’s Russian VIPs. In Mexico, the yacht took on a quarter of a million dollars of diesel fuel and left. The Galapagos were off. The Amadea was heading west.

When the vessel arrived in Fiji, more than 6,000 miles later, local authorities searched the ship at the request of US investigators. Inside, they found what appeared to be a Fabergé egg , and paperwork stating that the yacht belonged to an LLC owned by a trust controlled by a Russian businessman named Eduard Khudainatov. The egg was likely a fake. And according to the US government, the records were too.

Khudainatov, the Justice Department argued in court filings , was a “second-tier oligarch (at best)” who lacked the means to own such a ship. Agents concluded that the Amadea was fleeing to Russia at the behest of Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire who made a fortune in aluminum and gold, serves as a senator in the Russian parliament, and once tried to build a global soccer powerhouse in Dagestan. Kerimov has been barred from doing business in the US since 2018 , because of his position in Putin’s government. The feds, calling Khudainatov a “straw owner,” seized the ship for violating US sanctions, replaced the crew, and sent it to California.

Khudainatov, who has not been sanctioned by the US, has been appealing the decision ever since. His lawyers—and Kerimov’s—assert that the second-tier oligarch really did spend most of his reported net worth on two of the world’s largest yachts. They even deny that the ship ever went dark; any confusion over its ownership or whereabouts was just a matter of shoddy policing. But in the meantime, the US has been systematically unspooling Kerimov’s wealth. The government added his wife and three kids to its sanctions list, as part of a crackdown on “those who support sanctioned Russian persons.” It targeted a private-­jet company the Kerimovs used, and the yacht managers too. And not long after the Amadea arrived in San Diego, the Treasury Department froze a far more valuable asset with considerably less fanfare: a $1 billion family trust . The Kerimovs had allegedly sought a safe harbor for this asset too, beyond the reach of hostile governments, in a place where for decades the wealth of the world’s ultrarich has pooled in blissful anonymity.

Not Fiji—Delaware.

The capture of the Amadea was perhaps the most spectacular piece of a larger international reckoning. In the nearly two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies have blocked, seized, or frozen more than $280 billion in assets from hundreds of sanctioned Russian businessmen, politicians, family members, and fixers. They have taken boats, planes, and helicopters; artwork by Diego Rivera and Marc Chagall ; and some of the most coveted real estate on Earth. By putting the squeeze on what the Treasury Department called Putin’s “enablers,” the thinking goes, these governments can hit him where it hurts, isolate his regime, and pressure Russia to wind down the war.

The Biden administration has embraced these stories of decadent Russians, burning their corrupt spoils in Bond-villain excess. “Let’s get to the juicy stuff—the yachts,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told an audience at (of all places) the Aspen Security Forum in July 2022, where she discussed the work of the DOJ’s Task Force KleptoCapture. The seized ships are not just assets but morality tales—the overripe fruit of a society in which the levers of government have been turned to the enrichment of a few. You are supposed to gawk, less with envy than with an air of self-satisfaction, at people like the Kerimovs, lounging offshore in their teak-floored cocoon, drinking warm milk—according to court records—out of Hermès mugs . In the language of political messaging, “oligarch” is code for Second World and seedy.

But underpinning the sordid Russian saga was an inescapably American one. As investigators pored over bank statements and real estate records, they added new layers to a map journalists and watchdogs have been piecing together for years—of a sometimes underground but often wholly legal international network in which the wealth of autocratic regimes was funneled through the firms, markets, and institutions of places that fashion themselves as the antithesis of Putin’s Russia. Through a labyrinth of corporations, trusts, and false fronts, oligarch money made its way into the hands of nannies in California, fracking firms in Texas, wealth managers in New York, startups in Silicon Valley, and factory workers in the Midwest .

Pay enough attention to this robust American infrastructure of wealth, secrecy, and tax avoidance, and you might find yourself asking an uncomfortable question: If the Amadea is a symbol of a failed political and economic system, what exactly does that make all of our superyachts?

“We talk all the time about Putin and his oligarchic friends,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me recently. “But for obvious reasons we don’t talk about oligarchy in the United States.”

Increasingly, though, a wide range of voices on the left and right are speaking in exactly those terms. Steve Bannon has complained that his party had been hijacked by “ oligarchs ” such as Rupert ­Murdoch and hedge-funder Ken Griffin. A bestselling book described Bannon’s former bosses, the Trumps, as American Oligarchs . Donald Trump Jr., for his part, complained that China controls “America’s oligarchs.” A group of congressional Democrats is pushing the OLIGARCH Act to tax and audit the wealth of the richest Americans. “We’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch,” Paul Krugman wrote recently, in reference to Elon Musk. Pick any billionaire with a media company—or any billionaire who’s tried to bankrupt one—and chances are you can find a prominent critic lambasting them in language once reserved for upwardly mobile ex-Soviets.

Some of these voices, like Sanders, are quite serious about how we’ve gotten into this new Gilded Age, and how we can get out of it again. Others are just seriously messed up. But this rhetorical shift is driven by a common awareness that all is not well: The same tools and systems that have made the United States a safe space for the world’s hoarded wealth have frayed our own social contract, broken our domestic politics, and incubated a new class of ultrawealthy barons in its place. It’s the age of American Oligarchy.

America’s oligarchs, like Russia’s, are both the results of a system failure, and active engineers of that failure. They hang in many of the same circles. They dock their boats at the same marinas, compete for the same real estate and works of art, and stash their money under the same couch cushions. Their worlds converge on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in the corridors of power. There has been so much Russian oligarchic money sloshing around the United States, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to say where exactly one system ends and another begins.

But there is something new at work here. This American oligarchy offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square. These men (mostly) exult in their almost godlike status over the politicians they fund, the platforms they own, and the industries they’ve effectively monopolized. They are prone to grandiose proclamations about outer space and immortality . But the day-to-day effect of their power is felt less in the glitter than in the gravity it exerts on everything else—the accumulated burden and strain that hardening political and economic inequality puts on public services, on policy, and on the places we live and work. This world ropes you in with its yachts and private jets, but the story of American oligarchy is not just about the spoils. It’s about what everyone else is losing in the process.

Fear of an out-of-control oligarchy was once as American as Appomattox. In the runup to the Civil War, abolitionists routinely condemned the “oligarchs” of the planter class, who used their grip on slave states to dominate national politics until even the courts worked for them. The idea that an aspiring democracy had adopted the wrong Greek political system represented an existential crisis. Campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Charles Sumner invoked “Slave Oligarchy” more than 20 times in one speech. They had “entered into and possessed the National Government,” he said , “like an Evil Spirit.”

Reconstruction was an attempt, among other things, to break the structures of oligarchy. But in the century that followed, the term took on a now-familiar hue—provincial, elemental, and foreign. “The word captures the archaic, slightly feudal nature of social relations,” the New York Times suggested in 1981, “in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala.” Or it connoted the backroom politics of bureaucrats and bosses . Oligarchy marked a primitive state. It wasn’t something you became. Then, in 1996, Boris Berezovsky went to Davos. 

Boastful and balding, with a background in applied mathematics, Berezovsky was part of the new breed of Russian businessmen, a little bit grifty and a little bit thrifty, who were building huge fortunes as President Boris Yeltsin privatized the former Soviet state. In a bonanza known as “ loans for shares ,” Yeltsin agreed to quietly unload a dozen government-owned companies for cents on the dollar. But the deal would only go through if he won a second term. So between sessions at the World Economic Forum, Berezovsky and his allies hatched a plan to use their wealth and control of the media to save Yeltsin. After the election, Berezovsky took a victory lap. The seven men who had joined forces, he boasted (with more than a little exaggeration), now held 50 percent of Russia’s wealth.

The defining trait of this “new class of oligarchs”—as the postelection coverage dubbed them —was that they seemed to want people to know they were oligarchs. Berezovsky called his system “corporate government.”

This oligarchy could not have existed if Russia were not Russia, but it also bore the imprimatur of Harvard and Wall Street. In the early 1990s, American lawyers, bankers, and academics descended on Moscow to mold the post-Soviet landscape in their image, helping to set up markets, draft laws, and cut deals. The Russian businessmen who thrived in this new system, for their part, “adopted the style and methods of the great robber barons,” the journalist David Hoffman observed in his 2002 book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia . They studied tycoons like Rupert Murdoch. They were even influenced by a text about the American Gilded Age that had once been used to scare Soviets away from capitalism—Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier , in which the protagonist, Hoffman wrote, “exploited banks, the state, and investors, manipulated the whole stock market and gobbled up companies.”

That form of oligarchy was short-lived. When Putin took office a few years later, he demanded fealty from the moguls, and Berezovsky later died in exile. But if Putin inverted the power structure, the effect was the same: Russia remained a place where an elite few grew rich off a rigged economy, while funneling their money outside the country for safekeeping. Wealthy Russians transferred as much as $150 billion out of the country in the 1990s. By the time Trump took office, Russia’s ultrawealthy were storing 60 percent of their holdings offshore. Much of the money made its way to the same country that helped shape the Russian system in the first place. It was as if an invisible pipeline suddenly switched on.

The spoils of Russia and other countries flowed to the United States not just because of its stability, but because the American political and financial system put up a big flashing sign inviting the world’s wealth hoarders to come and stay a while. Here, they could achieve near-total anonymity if they purchased real estate in cash or routed the transaction through a shell company or a trust—which were increasingly based in decidedly onshore US jurisdictions such as Wyoming and South Dakota . In New York and Miami, gleaming new high-rises sat empty; a penthouse, for the asset-hoarding class, was not a home but a different kind of bank.

This great transnational wealth transfer was eased along by the booming, multitrillion-dollar American private-investment industry. If a foreign investor wanted to put money in a US-based financial institution or publicly traded company, notes Gary Kalman, the executive director of Transparency International US, those shops are required to perform due diligence. But hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity are bound by no such rules and have fought efforts to impose them.

“The reason we haven’t crippled the oligarchs as much as we would like, or the sanctions haven’t been quite as effective as we had hoped,” Kalman told me, “is because a bunch of these assets are hiding, likely in Western democracies, in everything from anonymous companies to anonymous trusts funneled into investment structures that are largely hidden from law enforcement.”

Through shell companies and middlemen, ultrawealthy Russians funneled huge sums of money into American investments. The Delaware trust linked to the Kerimovs pumped $28 million into Silicon Valley firms, according to court records , including a venture capital fund, a self-driving car company, and a “startup temple” for young disrupters that was housed in a San Francisco church previously slated to become a homeless shelter. Roman Abramovich, who bought a state oil company with Berezovsky and later sold it for a 5,100 percent profit, reportedly directed billions of dollars to a boutique investment manager in New York’s Hudson Valley. According to a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against the company in September for allegedly violating registration rules, the firm managed more than $7 billion in assets for just one client, an unnamed wealthy Russian politician and businessman who made a fortune in privatization and sure sounds a lot like Abramovich. While some of those funds reportedly made their way to heavyweights like the Carlyle Group and BlackRock , Abramovich also backstopped a private ambulance company and a fracking startup, and gave $225 million in seed money to what is now the weed dispensary chain Curaleaf. (Abramovich, who did not respond to a request for comment, has not been accused of wrongdoing by the SEC or sanctioned by the United States.)

A succession of government investigations found that lax regulations also made the American investment and real estate markets magnets for money laundering, but the US was in no rush to tighten its rules. Cashing in on the Russian exodus was a boon for American budgets and American business. Prior to getting elected president, it was practically Donald Trump’s entire job .

Just as telling as the money that was secret was all the money that wasn’t. Aluminum magnate Viktor Vekselberg, a star in the tech sector , made large donations on his own or through his company to MIT, MoMA, and the Clinton Foundation. Others sprinkled their money to the Kennedy Center, the Mayo Clinic, and the Guggenheim. With big parties and large checks, they courted America’s gatekeepers. What is so much money good for, after all, if you can’t buy acceptance?

One night in 2013, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, held a soiree at an Italian restaurant on Park Avenue on behalf of Abramovich and his then-wife, Dasha Zhukova, who would soon unveil plans to turn four adjoining townhouses on the Upper East Side into the city’s largest private home. For months that spring, Abramovich’s 533-foot yacht, Eclipse , had docked on the Hudson, drawing spectators to marvel at its pools and helipads, and wedding-cake deck. Photos of the ship have a surreptitious quality, like a hasty snapshot of a rare woodpecker; a sophisticated network of lasers had reportedly been deployed, to deter the paparazzi.

At the party, according to HuffPost , Jared Kushner rubbed shoulders with Wendi Deng Murdoch and Leonardo DiCaprio. The media mogul Barry Diller, who once warned that corporate consolidation was creating an “oligarchy” in his industry, showed up, and Gayle King too. When it was time to speak, Bloomberg praised the guests of honor for their philanthropy, and announced that he was naming Abramovich an honorary citizen of New York.

The influx of foreign money had been a “godsend,” he later told New York magazine. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Over the last decade, stories of foreign oligarchs have been a pervasive and insidious presence in national politics. But all of this overseas money sloshing around did not corrupt the American system so much as it made unavoidable the ways in which it was already compromised. Affluent arrivistes did not get special treatment per se; they availed themselves of the services that American elites so often do. Oleg Deripaska’s top lobbyist was Bob Dole . His lawyers worked for the pill-pushing Sackler family. Shady foreign officials store their money in Great Plains trusts just like Pritzkers . The great irony of the post-invasion reckoning is that Putin’s billionaires were escaping a country that is not, in fact, much of an oligarchy anymore, for the comforts of a place that increasingly is.

“We need a translator,” Bloomberg quipped at that 2013 event. “Roman’s going to have a heart attack thinking he has to pay taxes.”

But the defining feature of American wealth today is that our oligarchs don’t really have to. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who built one of the world’s largest companies around a loophole in sales taxes and has raked in millions in tax breaks designed for impoverished communities, paid no income tax at all in 2007 and 2011, according to ProPublica — a period in which he owned part of a mountain range. His rival for the title of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, paid nothing at all in 2018 . (In Cameron County, Texas, where SpaceX has scorched a state park and uprooted a beachfront community, Musk’s company will finally begin paying taxes in 2024.) Peter Thiel has used a loophole in the tax code to stash $5 billion in a Roth IRA. While the IRS targets working-class Black Americans, the list of billionaires who have paid no income tax in recent years is long. Bloomberg could have set his special guest straight—after all, the mayor was one of them .

Taxing labor but not wealth starves state coffers to fill personal ones. Instead of public works and universal programs, you get Big Philanthropy—donor networks and foundations that validate monopolistic fortunes under the pretense of disbursing them. Discretionary giving provides America’s ultrawhite ultrawealthy a kind of agenda-setting, extra-political power to go with their agenda-setting political power: Make enough money and you don’t have to fund essential services; you can run your own projects on your own notions of benevolence, remaking entire sectors of public life. From media to public health to elections to city halls, everyone in a jam wants a billionaire to come plug the suspicious billionaire-sized holes in their budgets. Many of the hospital wings and college libraries our oligarchs choose to build are quite nice. Plenty of the programs they choose to fund are quite well intentioned. But the creator of a Hot-or-Not app for Harvard kids pumping $100 million into a school district—as Mark Zuckerberg once did in Newark —does not support a civil society so much as it supplants one.

Such a system has profound consequences for the rest of us. In a 2009 paper , two Northwestern professors singled out the robust American wealth-protection industry—the one those Russians were eagerly taking advantage of—as both a driver and a symptom of this country’s descent into hyper-minority rule. America’s ultrawealthy, they argued, “hire armies of professional, skilled actors” to “labor as salaried advocates and defenders of core oligarchic interests”—lobbyists, lawyers, think-tankers, and consultants. The political system still maintains many of the trappings of a democracy, in part because the ultrawealthy who fund campaigns disagree about a lot of things. But politics functions within the boundaries defined by this cohort.  Another study a few years later put this point more finely: The most determinative factor on whether a policy would become law was how much support it had from “economically elite Americans.” A Supreme Court justice taking a vacation on a billionaire’s yacht isn’t the peak of American oligarchy. That same billionaire using the vacation to reduce his tax bill is.

In 2021, Bezos traveled to the edge of space aboard a vessel called New Shepard . The launch pad, on a ranch in Far West Texas he had purchased with what he called his “winnings,” was not far from the site of another pet project he was building under the guise of a charitable foundation: a $42 million clock inside of a mountain Bezos also owned, which he hoped would last 10,000 years. For a few minutes, 66.4 miles above the Earth, Bezos exalted in his own weightlessness, attempting to catch floating Skittles with his mouth. After landing, still dressed in his custom blue jumpsuit, he took a moment to acknowledge the gravity of the moment. 

He wanted to thank “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” he said . “Because you guys paid for all of this.”

It is uncommon for someone in such a position to describe the balance sheet so plainly—to point with a smile to a ­phallic rocket ship that goes nowhere new and assert that this is what delivery drivers peed in a water bottle for. But this is the nature of oligarchy: Your sweat is their jet fuel.

Perhaps no one has worked harder to make “oligarchy” a feature of American political discourse than Bernie Sanders, the 82-year-old democratic socialist whose two campaigns for president tapped into dissatisfaction with structural inequality. In his most recent book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism , “oligarchy” is the central villain.

Sanders isn’t just throwing out a pejorative. The United States checks all the boxes he’s laid out, he told me—“a system in which a small number of people have enormous power, and they have enormous wealth, and they create a system, which is designed to protect their interests.”

It is not simply about being rich, in this line of thinking. Oligarchy is about people with money using that money to reshape society to their benefit in a way that everyone else feels. Sanders rattles off the basic symptoms: Astronomical inequality. (By one measure , the richest Americans control a greater share of the wealth now than their counterparts did during the Gilded Age.) A political system dominated by ultrawealthy donors and, increasingly, ultrawealthy candidates. And decades of consolidation that has reduced whole industries into a handful of megacorporations.

“You have more concentration of ownership in sector after sector today than we have ever had,” he says. “Whether it is financial services, whether it’s transportation, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s media, you have fewer and fewer large corporate entities controlling those sectors, and that is one of the reasons we’re able to see an incredible amount of corporate greed taking place in recent years.”

When Sanders and I spoke last spring, Elon Musk was in the early stages of a salt-the-earth takeover of Twitter, which seemed to largely entail firing the people who made it work and tweeting “interesting” about the sort of people who are facing jail time in Romania. It was an example of the market concentration Sanders was talking about—of what happens when a single company owns an entire mode of communication, and then that company is acquired by the world’s oldest 14-year-old boy. But Musk’s behavior underscored something else about the American oligarchy. It’s not just about the money they make, but the ways they make it.

For all the chaos, there was a linear kind of logic to the system that made Russians like Kerimov and Abramovich rich—there is money, of course, in precious metals. The information economy, too, is built on natural resources in the traditional sense. Track the supply chains to their end and you’ll find workers toiling in mines , and power plants burning coal to keep the server farms running. Behind the rise of artificial intelligence is an underclass of “ ghost ” workers, filtering abusive content out of chatbots for a few bucks an hour.

But American oligarchy is extractive on a deeper level than the resources it consumes. You “paid for all of this,” as Bezos put it, not just with your hard-earned cash and your labor, but with a little piece of yourself. Shoshana Zuboff, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has written about a class she calls the “ information oligarchs .” These tech giants like Google and Meta are driven by what she calls the “extraction imperative”—in which the entire scope of operation was built around harvesting your data and attention for the purposes of selling it or tailoring products. Your time is the precarious foundation of the entire internet economy, the basic unit upon which all else is organized. Reed Hastings, the executive chairman of Netflix, once said that his biggest competitor was sleep .

“Surveillance capitalists know everything about us , whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us ,” Zuboff argues in her 2018 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . “They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us , but not for us .” To Zuboff, this represents a challenge not just to democracies—because of the imposition of a new and unaccountable hierarchy—but also to individual autonomy. There is no alternative technological space to turn to; they own a plane of existence. And the rise of AI, powered by the likes of Zuckerberg, is taking this extraction imperative to new levels—mining vast reams of data and written content so that a machine might better take your job or commodify your identity. Tech companies even have a term for the human inputs they use to build their products: “ data exhaust .” Since last July, dozens of writers have filed suit against both Meta and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging that their respective machine-learning projects are built, in part, on copyrighted materials. (Meta and OpenAI both claim that their reliance on published works was “fair use.”) Musk, who is developing his own line of brain implants, warned last spring that artificial intelligence could bring about “ civilizational destruction ”—before announcing that he, too, would be launching his own AI venture .

The relationship between government and oligarchy is defined by a kind of groveling—the clacking of a dozen mayors begging Musk to build them a simple tunnel. During the bidding war for Amazon’s second headquarters, hundreds of cities and states debased themselves for a shot at the prize. Dallas offered to build an “ Amazon University ” next to City Hall. A city in Georgia offered to change its name to “Amazon.” It was loans-for-shares in reverse: Bezos wasn’t bidding for the state; he’d developed something so big—and had been allowed to develop something so big—that states were bidding for him. The company once set a goal of raising $1 billion in government incentives in a single year; in oligarchic America, taxes pay you.

Even as they get their way with municipalities, these American oligarchs still harbor fantasies of simply running their own. For years, Reid Hoffman, VC billionaire Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a handful of other Silicon Valley heavies quietly bought up a huge swath of Northern California to build an entirely new city—one where they could model, as the New York Times put it, “ new forms of governance .” A Thiel-linked fund has invested in an effort to start a new monarcho-capitalist metropolis somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. Musk, who is building a model community outside Austin while tightening control over his South Texas “Starbase,” fantasizes about one day using SpaceX to colonize Mars—of building an entire society as he sees fit, while extending “ the light of consciousness .” Lurking behind his projects is an often explicitly stated desire to reimagine shared spaces. The never-completed Hyperloop, which Musk promised would transport passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 600 miles per hour, was a ploy to stop high-speed rail, according to his first biographer, Ashlee Vance. A critic of public transit, which he says “ sucks ,” Musk envisions a future in which cities will instead devote more and more of their underground and overhead space to his own fleet of self-driving Tesla electric cars, transforming the entire idea of what cities should be. The Musk-owned satellite network, Starlink, controls more than half the satellites in the night sky—giving its owner so much power over communications that he effectively vetoed a Ukrainian military operation. The billionaire’s stewardship of Twitter (which he’s now named X) is uncommonly slapstick compared to the ventures that made him rich, but it does share something essential: He is attempting to commandeer something that was held in common and leave in its place something individualized and worse.

The sum of American oligarchy is not just withering democracy and so much inequality, but a kind of omnipresence: They are something more than rich—oligarchs are the main characters of our timeline. But even as our lives are increasingly subject to the whims of bored kingpins, their spaces are detached from our own. Some can retreat to private islands (Larry Ellison owns Hawaii’s sixth largest). Others live in communities so exclusive that the help has to come from one state away . Embedded in this system is the capacity for escape. They can send their wealth across borders without really moving it. They can choose where they pay taxes, or by which methods they don’t pay them at all. They can insulate themselves from the world they’ve sold for parts. And if all else fails, they can take to the sea.

In the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who is based in Barcelona, began periodically visiting the city’s luxury marina to check on the status of Russian-owned boats. Finley, who had researched the industry for a satirical novel about Putin’s security services, found that vessels that might otherwise spend weeks preparing for a voyage were disappearing overnight. “I went down one day and the Galactica Super Nova was there, and there was no hustle and bustle around it,” she told me, referring to a 230-foot yacht reputed to belong to a Putin-allied Russian petro-billionaire , who was named, a few weeks later, on a UK sanctions list “targeting those who prop up Russian-backed illegal breakaway regions of Ukraine.” “I thought, you’ll see them loading food on it, or they’ll be filling it with gas and water, that type of thing—there was nothing. And then I went down the next day and she was gone.” As oligarch-linked ships made their escape, Finley began tracking their whereabouts using open-source data and writing up their exploits for Whale Hunting , a newsletter dedicated to all things kleptocracy. More than just a novelty, “the yachts are symbols of the corruption which is corroding democracy,” Finley said—and a road map to understanding both the flow of dubious wealth to the West, and the tools that Russian elites deploy to obscure it.

But these days, people aren’t just monitoring the yachts of sanctioned oligarchs. They’re also following the movements of the American ones. While Finley was tracking Putin’s cronies and the Amadea was making its way to San Diego, a long-suffering football fan in Northern Virginia started keeping an eye on the Lady S , the boat belonging to then–Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder. It’s reportedly the first yacht in the world with a 12-seat IMAX theater .

Snyder was a model of what DOJ filings might call a second-tier oligarch—a telemarketing magnate and megadonor who unsuccessfully sued an alt-weekly for $1 million after it caricatured him on its cover. (Snyder promised to use any monetary award to fight homelessness, his lawyers wrote in their complaint —“Mr. Snyder is heavily involved in philanthropy.”) His stewardship of the football team was the embodiment of American capitalism’s perverse gravity—managing to grow his investment sevenfold while presiding over an ever-worsening product that seemed to deliberately insult the people who paid for it. When, in June 2022, the House Oversight Committee asked Snyder to testify about his franchise’s misogynistic culture, the billionaire’s lawyer informed members that the owner had “longstanding plans to be out of the country on business matters.”

Snyder’s unbreakable commitment turned out to be an award show in Cannes for ad-industry execs. Inspired by the Russian yacht-watchers and a Florida college student who had created an account called ElonJet to track Musk’s private planes, the fan decided to look up the Lady S using publicly available data. In the weeks that followed, while the committee unsuccessfully sought to serve the owner with a subpoena, @DanSnydersYacht —the proprietor of which spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of incurring the notoriously vindictive billionaire’s wrath—amassed thousands of followers by tweeting out the whereabouts of the owner’s boat and private jet, as Snyder made his way across the Mediterranean to Israel.

“I think what kind of made it popular…was just, hey, here’s what a billionaire can get away with,” he told me. “If you or I got subpoenaed, we’d be freaking out and have to show up immediately or face consequences. If you’re a billionaire on your yacht, you can dodge a lot of legal consequences for a while.” (Snyder eventually did testify, sans subpoena and via Zoom, where he answered with some variation of I-don’t-recall “ more than 100 times ,” according to the final congressional report.)

There is something kind of subversive about tracking these vessels. It’s a sliver of sunlight in a world that’s designed to keep such things out. But not long after he purchased Twitter, Musk shut down ElonJet. He claimed it had put his family at risk, although the story he first told soon fell apart . The details, in any event, seemed superfluous; that is just what happens when an oligarch buys the platform you use to track the oligarchs.

In the meantime, American oligarchs are eagerly filling the vacuum left by the retreating Russians. The proceeds from sanctioned steel-magnate Dmitry Pumpyansky’s seized yacht went to the bank to whom he owed money— J.P. Morgan . Eric Schmidt paid $67.6 million at auction for a superyacht alleged to belong to a sanctioned Russian fertilizer billionaire—but rescinded the bid after the oligarch’s daughter claimed it was hers all along. Last April, a new boat pulled into the harbor in Mallorca, and tied up at the dock a few hundred feet away from where Viktor Vekselberg’s Tango had been impounded for 13 months. It was Harlan Crow’s Michaela Rose . 

And this past summer, while taxpayers were spending big to maintain the Amadea ’s teak deck, a Dutch shipbuilder put the finishing touches on a 417-foot-long ship for its newest client. The Koru , named for a Maori spiraling pattern, was a gleaming, three-masted sailboat, with room for 18 guests and a swimming pool. The company had designed a 246-foot motor-­powered support yacht to go with it—with its own helipad to boot. In lieu of an albatross, a wooden carving on the Koru ’s prow was said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the fiancée of a certain Skittle-munching oligarch. The owner may be Jeff Bezos, but you guys all paid for it.

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The United States vs. a yacht: How the government can take a Russian oligarch's $90 million superyacht

• The US seized a Russian oligarch's superyacht for the first time this week.
• The process of civil asset forfeiture lets the Justice Department sue objects and take them.
• But the government has to pay for upkeep while the case goes through the courts.

On Monday, US federal agents, working with Spanish authorities, seized a 255-foot, $90 million superyacht belonging to Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The seizure was part of "Operation KleptoCapture," the US Justice Department announced . Working with the Treasury Department and allied countries , prosecutors are investigating and prosecuting oligarchs who break laws connected to new US sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

For weeks, countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Italy have made showy yacht seizures , raiding them for computers and closing them off as their suspected oligarch owners are slapped with sanctions.

In the United States, seizing a yacht is a little less straightforward.

First, you must sue the yacht.

The United States vs. a yacht

The seizure of Vekselberg's yacht, named the Tango, was part of a process called civil asset forfeiture.

Prosecutors determine that some property — in this case, a yacht, but it could be something like a pile of cash, a car, or a house — was instrumental in illegal activity or was purchased from the profit of a crime. Prosecutors then ask a judge to sign a warrant for a seizure, which permits them to take it.

Civil asset forfeiture is an especially useful legal instrument for when prosecutors want to go after people living in other countries. If a criminal case were filed against a foreigner, they can simply stay out of the US or countries with US extradition treaties.

Criminal asset forfeiture can only be used upon a conviction. And if a person can't stand trial, they can't be convicted.

So, we have civil asset forfeiture.

The rationale for seizing Vekselberg's yacht was laid out in court documents made public Monday and reviewed by Insider. The yacht itself is a defendant in the case, titled "In the matter of the seizure of the motor yacht Tango, with International Maritime Organization Number 1010703." If Vekselberg wants his yacht back, he'll come into the case as a claimant — not a defendant.

An FBI affidavit filed to court said the Tango was at the center of a bank fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Prosecutors accused Vekselberg and unnamed co-conspirators of structuring payments regarding the boat in a way that obscured the oligarch's ownership, thereby avoiding transaction reporting requirements.

"Bank records received by law enforcement show that, prior to being sanctioned by the Treasury Department, Vekselberg made U.S. dollar payments from accounts in his own name to Arinter and its managers," the FBI agent wrote, referring to a holding entity for the yacht. "These payments are consistent with Vekselberg being the true owner of the TANGO."

The US has had sanctions against the Ukraine-born Vekselberg and his company, the Moscow-based Renova Group, since 2018.

But the Constitution's Fourth Amendment doesn't allow the US government to take things belonging to oligarchs just by putting them on a sanctions list.

What Operation KleptoCapture does, according to Duncan Levin, a former prosecutor specializing in money laundering and asset forfeiture cases, is train the Justice Department's resources toward sanctioned oligarchs who may have disguised their forbidden financial transactions.

"It is not illegal to be an oligarch," Levin, an attorney at Tucker Levin PLLC, told Insider. "It is illegal to commit crimes, including some that take place outside the United States."

Related stories

Fortunately for prosecutors investigating Russian oligarchs, money laundering gives "a lot of wiggle room" for the types of assets that can be seized in connection to the alleged crime, according to Sarah Krissoff, a former federal prosecutor overseeing complex financial investigations.

"The statutes are pretty vast," Krissoff, an attorney at Day Pitney, told Insider. "That's definitely where I would work if I was a prosecutor and trying to get at some of these assets."

Your tax dollars will pay for the yacht's upkeep

So, how does one seize a yacht?

In the case of the Tango, which is docked in Palma de Mallorca, US authorities asked Spanish authorities for help. A video  the Justice Department published  shows agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Spain's interior ministry boarding the yacht and entering the control room.

—Jacob Shamsian (@JayShams) April 4, 2022

When the federal government seizes something, it goes under the control of the US Marshals Service . They're in charge of making sure the property is kept in good condition. For the Tango, they have a gym, elevator, beach club, and beauty salon  to worry about.

"If there's something that has to be done, like make sure the property doesn't flood or make sure the water's turned off in the winter or something — that's the Marshals' responsibility," Krissoff told Insider. "So that can get very complicated for a yacht."

The US Marshals Service has a huge network of private contractors they work with to take care of upkeep. For complicated assets like a plane, yacht, or artwork, it'll probably be a contractor doing the day-to-day work rather than actual marshals. Cars are often held in specialized lots, and boats may be placed in dry docks to make maintenance easier.

The Justice Department said in a statement Monday that the yacht is still in Palma de Mallorca. It might just stay there. Owners of seized assets, in many cases, may still be able to use them until litigation is complete. Prosecutors might just make an on-paper seizure with the intent of selling it down the line.

It could take years for a forfeiture case to make its way through the courts, and the scope of the owner's use is often negotiated, Krissoff said. The court records for the Tango seizure are still sealed, and it's not clear if prosecutors have talked with Vekselberg (or his lawyers) about what they'll do with the yacht.

All of the experts who spoke with Insider mentioned the saga of 650 Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan skyscraper.

The US Attorney's office in Manhattan tried to seize it in 2008 , alleging it was partly owned by a sanctioned Iranian bank. It took until 2017, when a jury agreed with the prosecutors' case, for the seizure to move forward — but the moves were thwarted in 2019 when the jury verdict was overturned upon appeal.

Having the US Marshals Service take care of a skyscraper for 11 years only to lose the case would have been a financial debacle. For something like a yacht, the Justice Department might allow Vekselberg to continue paying for the upkeep instead of the US government.

In some cases, prosecutors can apply for "interlocutory sale," Levin said, where they'd sell the asset. It's an option they consider when properties are expensive to maintain or would diminish in value.

"They'd take the yacht, they'd sell it, and they'd hold the money in an escrow account," Levin said. "And then they'd seize the money in lieu of the yacht. And if they lost the case, they would give the money back."

If that were to happen, whoever bought the yacht would get to keep it.

Seizing a yacht may make a difference in Ukraine

Vekselberg is worth $16.6 billion, according to Bloomberg . A yacht worth an estimated $90 million, at the end of the day, is a little more than half a percentage point of his estimated net worth.

According to Juan Zarate, who oversaw the George W. Bush administration's efforts to seize Saddam Hussein's assets, the new wave of sanctions is unlikely to have an immediate effect on the war in Ukraine. Seizing one of Putin's associate's yachts isn't going to stop a bombing campaign.

But the cumulative effect of sanctions — and the signal that the US is willing to go to great lengths to enforce them — can be "incredibly painful" in the long term, Zarate said.

"There's a mismatch of the expectations of what these kinds of cases can do in the short term versus what they do in the long term, which is to constrain the ability of these oligarchs to operate freely and comfortably, and the psychology around that," Zarate told Insider.

Operation KleptoCapture comes amid calls to seize yachts, apartments, and other flashy luxuries flaunted by ultrawealthy Russian nationals believed to profit from the country's corruption.

There's also the REPO — short for Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs — task force between the Justice and Treasury departments to enforce sanctions connected to the Ukraine invasion.

"Nothing's gonna be a silver bullet and nothing's gonna solve the problem with Putin wanting to invade a neighbor, but it is part of an effort to pressure and to isolate," Zarate said.

According to the FBI affidavit, Vekselberg's Renova Group is complicit in "the threat posed by the actions and policies of certain persons who had undermined democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threatened the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine; and contributed to the misappropriation of Ukraine's assets."

The FBI affidavit accuses the company of other nefarious misdeeds. It says that Vekselberg and associates have been accused of using "armed soldiers and corrupted Russian court proceedings" to gain control of a Siberian oilfield, and plundered a bank to buy Faberge eggs, according to reports. Executives at his companies have been arrested on bribery charges, as well.

The selection of Andrew Adams — an experienced corruption prosecutor who oversaw transnational crime, asset forfeiture, and money laundering at the US Attorney's office in Manhattan — to lead Operation KleptoCapture signals just how serious the US government is about going after oligarchs' assets, Krissoff said.

Adams' team was famous for being "remarkably creative" in building forfeiture cases, something that will come in handy as the task force goes after everything from yachts to cryptocurrency, she said.

"They're used to looking at complicated ownership structures," Krissoff said. "They're used to situations where it's very muddy, how the asset was procured. They're used to finding creative ways for identifying ownership of the asset."

Watch: Videos show dead bodies and a mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine

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https://www.barrons.com/news/russian-oligarch-usmanov-starts-legal-battle-with-ubs-4d5e3540

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Russian Oligarch Usmanov Starts Legal Battle With UBS

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Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov has launched legal proceedings against Swiss banking giant UBS in Germany for passing on "unfounded" information to authorities investigating him for alleged money laundering, his lawyer said on Monday.

Usmanov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, began legal action against UBS at a court in Frankfurt, the group's European headquarters, for "a series of unfounded reports" the bank allegedly sent to financial authorities.

This then "triggered a political investigation against him", his lawyer said.

Usmanov says UBS passed on to the police more than a dozen reports dating from 2018 to 2022 that he called "absurd and baseless if not knowingly false", violating rules around confidentiality, "personal rights" and "the banking contract".

By spreading "false allegations", the bank helped open an investigation and extend EU sanctions against him, causing financial losses and "enormous" reputational damage, his lawyer said.

The billionaire was one of dozens of Russian oligarchs hit by Western sanctions following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Germany has launched a probe against Usmanov for alleged money laundering and tax evasion, with police raiding UBS offices in late 2022 as part of the investigation.

German authorities have also searched Usmanov's property in the country and in 2022 seized the "Dilbar" yacht, the world's biggest, and worth around $600 million according to Forbes magazine. Usmanov denies owning it.

fcz/imm/ach

Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov has launched legal proceedings against Swiss banking giant UBS in Germany for passing on "unfounded" information to authorities investigating him for alleged money laundering, his lawyer said on Monday.

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US court blocks government sale of seized Russian oligarch's yacht

T he New York court has denied the US government the right to sell the luxurious yacht Amadea belonging to a Russian businessman, which was seized back in 2022. The proceeds from the sale of the vessel were intended to be transferred to Ukraine's benefit, according to Voice of America.

According to the US government, the super-yacht belongs to Russian businessman Suleiman Kerimov, who is under sanctions.

Two years ago in May, Fiji confiscated the Amadea vessel, subsequently handing it over to the USA.

Expenses for the confiscated yacht

It is worth noting that the US taxpayer is required to spend about $740,000 a month on maintenance and insurance for the 106-meter Amadea.

In order to reduce these costs, the US government requested permission to sell the vessel and convert its value into cash. Such practices are quite common in cases of civil forfeiture when the asset's value depreciates rapidly or its upkeep becomes too expensive.

Thus, the United States government sought to sell this super-yacht, estimated at $230 million, and transfer the proceeds to Ukraine as part of its support efforts.

Court proceedings and verdict

Meanwhile, legal proceedings are still ongoing, as the case of civil forfeiture became complicated after another Russian billionaire, Eduard Khudainatov, who is not under US sanctions, claimed ownership of Amadea.

In considering the case, the Southern District Court of New York this week ruled that the expenses for maintaining Amadea were not "excessive."

According to the court's ruling, in order to assess whether the maintenance expenses for Amadea are excessive, American court should not "look solely at the total dollar amount of the maintenance costs, but must principally consider whether those amounts are more than what is usual as compared to the maintenance costs for other similar yachts."

Thus, the court ruled that the government failed to prove that the expenses met this standard.

It is worth adding that the US Department of Justice has the right to appeal this decision.

Attempts by the oligarch to lift the yacht's arrest

In addition, two days after the decision was made, attorneys for Khudainatov and the company directly owning Amadea filed a memorandum opposing attempts by the US government to exclude Khudainatov from the case.

Although the prosecution claims that Khudainatov is not the actual owner of the yacht and has no right to challenge its confiscation, the memorandum from his defenders states that he is indeed the true owner, and thus Amadea is not subject to confiscation at all.

In June 2022, the USA won a legal battle over the arrest of the Russian super-yacht Amadea in Fiji. At that time, the United States took control of the vessel worth $325 million and relocated it from the southern part of the Pacific Ocean.

Earlier, it was reported that the United States imposed sanctions on two yachts linked to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin

Ukraine war latest: Putin arrives in North Korea; Russian forces 'move closer to key supply route'

Vladimir Putin has arrived in North Korea for a two-day visit - his first in more than two decades. Elsewhere, the UK's Ministry of Defence says Russian forces are moving closer to a key Ukrainian supply route in the eastern Donetsk region.

Tuesday 18 June 2024 19:03, UK

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Vladimir Putin has arrived in North Korea, the Kremlin has confirmed. 

The Russian president touched down in the country's capital, Pyongyang, where he will begin his two-day visit.

He was greeted at the airport by North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, according to RIA Novosti. 

A formal meeting between the two leaders is expected to take place tomorrow. 

In a presidential order issued yesterday, Putin said Moscow was looking to sign a "comprehensive strategic partnership treaty" with North Korea. 

The international community has raised alarm bells regarding his trip, with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg saying the military alliance was concerned about the support Russia could provide for North Korea's missile and nuclear programmes. 

Three Russian government aircraft have landed in Pyongyang in North Korea, according to flight tracking data. 

It is unclear if Vladimir Putin is on board any of the planes, but their arrival comes as the Russian president is expected to visit the country.

Flight Radar 24 shows the planes travelled from Yakutsk in east Siberia, where Putin travelled to earlier today. 

Vladimir Putin's visit to North Korea is an "opportunity for Russia to make mischief", an expert tells Sky News. 

The Russian president is due to arrive in the country this evening for a two-day visit. 

During his trip, he is expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to discuss an arms arrangement between Pyongyang and Moscow. 

The deal could see North Korea provide Russia with badly needed munitions in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers. 

Dr John Nilsson-Wright from the Centre for Geopolitics says the trip is a "very clear attempt" by Mr Putin to emphasise that Russia is not isolated. 

"This is an opportunity for Russia to make mischief internationally by undermining the international sanctions' regime," he adds. 

On security, though, he warns that Russia will have to be "cautious".  

"There is a danger that they could provoke a reaction from South Korea, and Russia and South Korea do have their own economic relationship," he says. 

Dutch outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte will be NATO's new secretary-general, according to reports. 

Dutch news outlet NOS quoted sources as saying Mr Rutte will replace Jens Stoltenberg when he steps down in October. 

Mr Stoltenberg endorsed the 57-year-old, saying he was a "very strong candidate" for the job. 

The US, UK, France, Slovakia, Hungary and Germany have publicly backed Mr Rutte as Mr Stoltenberg's successor. 

Romania has not yet given him the green light.

NATO takes decisions by consensus, so any candidate needs the support of all 32 allies.

Vladimir Putin is expected to arrive in North Korea shortly. 

The Russian president will head to Pyongyang to meet the country's leader Kim Jong Un during the two-day trip. 

The visit marks the first time he has been to North Korea in 24 years. 

It comes amid growing concerns about an arms arrangement between Pyongyang and Moscow. 

The deal could see North Korea provide Russia with badly needed munitions in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that would enhance the threat posed by Kim's nuclear weapons and missile programme. 

Russia has claimed to have destroyed a Ukrainian air force command post along the Dnipro River. 

In a post on Telegram, the Russian defence ministry said drone units located a "cluster" of Ukrainian air force "manpower" inside buildings on the right bank of the river, and paratroopers pinned down their radio frequencies. 

"By precise strikes from the closed firing position, the tank crews wiped out the enemy's command post and UAV control post," it added. 

UAV stands for unmanned aerial vehicle, and is often used to refer to drones. 

Russian forces have likely taken control of a Ukrainian village in the eastern Donetsk region, the UK's defence ministry has said. 

In an intelligence update, it said the fall of Novooleksandrivka, which is around 12 miles (20km) from Avdiivka, means Russian forces have moved closer to a key supply route - the T-05-04. 

Ukraine uses the road to send supplies to its forces based further east in the country.

The MoD said it was "highly likely" Russia's next objective would be capturing another nearby village called Vozdvyzhenka.

Taking control of that area would help "sever" the supply road and "disrupt Ukrainian logistics", it added.

Russia has been advancing throughout the region after taking control of Avdiivka earlier this year. 

Ukraine has claimed responsibility for an overnight drone attack on a Russian oil facility. 

The strike caused a massive blaze to spread across the oil reservoir in Russia's Rostov region, with more than 200 firefighters deployed to put it out. 

No casualties were reported, Russia's Emergencies Ministry said. 

It marks the latest long-range strike by Kyiv's forces on a border region. 

A Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to give the information to the media, said the attack was a special operation of Ukraine's security service, known as the SBU.

The drones targeted two Rostov oil depots that have 22 oil reservoirs, the official said.

Kyiv officials normally decline comment about attacks on Russian territory, though they sometimes refer obliquely to them.

A Ukrainian soldier has been beheaded by Russian soldiers in Donetsk, Ukraine's prosecutor general has claimed. 

Andriy Kostin shared an image on social media purporting to show a decapitated head on the bonnet of an armoured vehicle. Sky News has not verified the photo. 

"This terrible barbarism must have no place in the 21st century," he said. 

He said the incident was proof that Russia has committed war crimes as part of its "planned strategy". 

"These criminal orders were given at the command level of the battalion and company of the occupation forces," Mr Kostin added.

A pre-trial investigation into the incident has been launched, Mr Kostin's office said in a statement shared on Telegram. 

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