Owners of yachts arrested abroad will have to pay for their maintenance, otherwise the property may be confiscated and sold. Kira Vinokurova, special advisor on sanctions issues at Pen & Paper, and Ilya Shumanov, head of Transparency International Russia, told Kommersant about this.
At the same time, only those whose yachts are in the ports of France and Spain can pay for maintenance – so far only these two countries have made a basic permission for such payments to be made, and not blocked. Annual expenses for the maintenance of a yacht can reach 10-15% of its value, says Shumanov. According to him, in Spain and France there will be no more than two dozen such yachts. The French authorities counted five luxury ships and a number of cargo ships, which are also frozen.
Shumanova believes that owners may not pay for the maintenance of yachts, but in this case they will quickly become unusable. They can also be confiscated and sold to pay off a parking debt. That is exactly what happened to the $75 million 72.5m superyacht Axioma, which was delayed in Gibraltar in March. It belongs to the former member of the board of directors of the Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK) Dmitry Pumpyansky, who, after the start of the war, was on the sanctions lists of the European Union (EU), Great Britain, the United States and Canada.
Most of the oligarchs managed to relocate their yachts to waters free from sanctions, Kommersant writes. In May, it was reported that yachts linked to sanctioned Russian businessmen disappeared from tracking maps of the location of ships. At least six yachts associated with the Russians have stopped using the automatic identification system in order to avoid the confiscation of the vessels.
In particular, these are the Alfa Nero yachts of the owner of Phosagro Andrey Guryev, Galactica Super Nova of the former president of Lukoil Vagit Alekperov, Clio of Oleg Deripaska, Motor Yacht A of the ex-member of the Board of Directors of EuroChem Andrey Melnichenko, Ocean Victory of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of MMK Viktor Rashnikov and My Sky businessman Igor Kesaev. The last time the vessels were tracked was in early March or April.