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Superyacht reportedly owned by Russian oligarch arrives in Honolulu after being seized

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A massive luxury yacht reportedly belonging to a Russian oligarch docked in Honolulu on Thursday. It’s one of the several yachts seized by the U.S. Department of Justice because of their owners’ ties to Russia.

Tug boats met the yacht at sea about 10 a.m. and guided it into Honolulu Harbor.

The 348-foot luxury yacht, the Amadea, made a U-turn inside Honolulu Harbor and then docked at Pier 2. Federal agents with the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service were on board the vessel, which reportedly belongs to oligarch Soleiman Kerimov.

The yacht was seized in Fiji last month.

At a news conference last month, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to go after oligarchs’ assets amid the ongoing Russian attack on Ukraine. “It doesn’t matter how far you sail your yacht or how well you conceal your assets, the Justice Department will use every tool and find you and hold you accountable,” he said.

Fijian law enforcement and the FBI took control of the yacht last month. It’s valued at more than $300 million.

Kerimov himself is worth an estimated $14 billion.

He was sanctioned by the U.S. for alleged money laundering in 2018.

About a half dozen super vessels have been seized so far as part of an international campaign to pressure those aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The Justice Department will be relentless to hold accountable those who facilitate the death and destruction we are witnessing in Ukraine,” Garland said.

Special features on the sprawling yacht include a helipad, multiple pools and bars.

The Amadea left Fiji on June 7. Its journey was delayed because of disagreements between the US and the crew and contractors. The vessel is set to head out to California on Friday.

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Superyacht seized by U.S. from Russian billionaire arrives in San Diego Bay

June 27, 2022 / 3:40 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A $325 million superyacht seized by the United States from a sanctioned Russian oligarch arrived in San Diego Bay on Monday.

The 348-foot-long (106-meter-long) Amadea flew an American flag as it sailed past the retired aircraft carrier USS Midway and under the Coronado Bridge.

"After a transpacific journey of over 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers), the Amadea has safely docked in a port within the United States, and will remain in the custody of the U.S. government, pending its anticipated forfeiture and sale," the Department of Justice said in a statement.

The FBI linked the Amadea to the Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, and the vessel became a target of Task Force KleptoCapture, launched in March to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs to put pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine. The U.S. said Kerimov secretly bought the vessel last year through various shell companies.

But Justice Department  officials had been stymied  by a legal effort to contest the American seizure warrant and by a yacht crew that refused to sail for the U.S. American officials won a legal battle in Fiji to take the Cayman Islands-flagged superyacht earlier this month. 

The Amadea made a stop in Honolulu Harbor en route to the U.S. mainland. The Amadea boasts  luxury features  such as a helipad, mosaic-tiled pool, lobster tank and a pizza oven, nestled in a décor of "delicate marble and stones" and "precious woods and delicate silk fabrics," according to court documents.

"The successful seizure and transport of Amadea would not have been possible without extraordinary cooperation from our foreign partners in the global effort to enforce U.S. sanctions imposed in response to Russia's unprovoked and unjustified war in Ukraine," the Justice Department said.

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U.S. wins case to seize Russian superyacht in Fiji, sails away

The United States won a legal battle on Tuesday to seize a Russian-owned superyacht in Fiji and wasted no time in taking command of the $325 million vessel and sailing it away from the South Pacific nation.

The court ruling represented a significant victory for the U.S. as it encounters obstacles in its attempts to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs around the world. While those efforts are welcomed by many who oppose the war in Ukraine, some actions have tested the limits of American jurisdiction abroad.

In Fiji, the nation’s Supreme Court lifted a stay order which had prevented the U.S. from seizing the superyacht Amadea.

Chief Justice Kamal Kumar ruled that based on the evidence, the chances of defense lawyers mounting an appeal that the top court would hear were “nil to very slim.”

Kumar said he accepted arguments that keeping the superyacht berthed in Fiji at Lautoka harbor was “costing the Fijian government dearly.”

“The fact that U.S. authorities have undertaken to pay costs incurred by the Fijian government is totally irrelevant,” the judge found. He said the Amadea “sailed into Fiji waters without any permit and most probably to evade prosecution by the United States of America.”

The U.S. removed the motorized vessel within an hour or two of the court’s ruling, possibly to ensure the yacht didn’t get entangled in any further legal action.

In early May, the Justice Department issued a statement saying the Amadea had been seized in Fiji, but that turned out to be premature after lawyers appealed.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the U.S. intended to take the Amadea, which the FBI has linked to the Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov.

Fiji Director of Public Prosecutions Christopher Pryde said unresolved questions of money laundering and the ownership of the Amadea need to be decided in the U.S.

“The decision acknowledges Fiji’s commitment to respecting international mutual assistance requests and Fiji’s international obligations,” Pryde said.

In court documents, the FBI linked the Amadea to the Kerimov family through their alleged use of code names while aboard and the purchase of items such as a pizza oven and a spa bed. The ship became a target of Task Force KleptoCapture, launched in March to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs to put pressure on Russia to end the war.

The 348-foot -long vessel, about the length of a football field, features a live lobster tank, a hand-painted piano, a swimming pool and a large helipad.

Lawyer Feizal Haniff, who represented paper owner Millemarin Investments, had argued the owner was another wealthy Russian who, unlike Kerimov, doesn’t face sanctions.

The U.S. acknowledged that paperwork appeared to show Eduard Khudainatov was the owner but said he was also the paper owner of a second and even larger superyacht, the Scheherazade, which has been linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. questioned whether Khudainatov could really afford two superyachts worth a total of more than $1 billion.

“The fact that Khudainatov is being held out as the owner of two of the largest superyachts on record, both linked to sanctioned individuals, suggests that Khudainatov is being used as a clean, unsanctioned straw owner to conceal the true beneficial owners,” the FBI wrote in a court affidavit.

Court documents say the Amadea switched off its transponder soon after Russia invaded Ukraine and sailed from the Caribbean through the Panama Canal to Mexico, arriving with over $100,000 in cash. It then sailed thousands of miles (kilometers) across the Pacific Ocean to Fiji.

The Justice Department said it didn’t believe paperwork showing the Amadea was next headed to the Philippines, arguing it was really destined for Vladivostok or elsewhere in Russia.

The department said it found a text message on a crew member’s phone saying, “We’re not going to Russia” followed by a “shush” emoji.

The U.S. said Kerimov secretly bought the Cayman Island-flagged Amadea last year through various shell companies.

Kerimov made a fortune investing in Russian gold producer Polyus, with Forbes magazine putting his net worth at $14.5 billion. The U.S. first sanctioned him in 2018 after he was detained in France and accused of money laundering there, sometimes arriving with suitcases stuffed with 20 million euros.

Khudainatov is the former chairman and chief executive of Rosneft, the state-controlled Russian oil and gas company.

A rare look inside Nord, the $500 million megayacht of Russia’s richest man Alexei Mordashov. The 464 feet long tuxedo donning warship has palatial interiors. For extra fun, its garage has a hovercraft, a deep-diving submarine, ATV’s, a few Toyota Land Cruisers, and more.

The video shows us first-hand the elegance and enormousness of a megayacht in the truest sense of the term. From seemingly unending corridors to well-appointed interiors and the most insane tender garage, the Nord is a massive ship that’s impressive from the word go.

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A Yacht Owner’s Worst Nightmare

Nabbing a billionaire’s large boat is more complicated than you might think.

After the Soviet Union crumbled, dozens of Russian businessmen enriched themselves by buying up stakes in Russia’s commodity industries at rock-bottom prices. In later years, these men protected their wealth by cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Then, these oligarchs did what any self-respecting billionaire would do: They bought large, beautiful boats. Russian oligarchs, who now own about 10 percent of all superyachts, have boats with helicopter pads, swimming pools, “ infinite wine cellars ,” and hot tubs stabilized against the motion of the waves. And now all their boats are belong to us .

Or at least, that’s the idea. Ukraine’s allies are scrambling to seize the oligarchs’ yachts in order to punish Putin for invading Ukraine, by putting the squeeze on his buddies. Sadly, though the yacht-seizing is undoubtedly the most badass element of Putin’s global castigation, it has also proved to be more complicated, and less gratifying, than it sounds.

I was hoping for exciting nighttime combat on the high seas, but the process of detaining a yacht is rather boring. Most of the 16 yacht “seizures” that have occurred so far have been more like freezes, according to Alex Finley, a writer and former CIA officer who has been tracking the seizures. First, a country will notice that a large, majestic vessel is parked in one of its shipyards and attempt to ascertain its true owner—a process that requires cracking open shell company after shell company, a nesting doll of paperwork, if you will. If the yacht is indeed connected to an oligarch, the country’s port authority simply forbids the yacht to move. The yacht remains at the dock, and the oligarch can’t use it for a while. The owners aren’t usually on their yachts when the boats are seized, Finley told me, so there are unfortunately no images of carabinieri dragging away tuxedoed men as they curse in Russian. Nor are the boats chained to the docks with comically large padlocks, as I had hoped. “They just are not given permission to leave,” Finley said.

Some countries are deregistering the yachts, negating their insurance, which discourages the boat from sailing off. An Italian official who was not authorized to give reporters his name told me that the boats are simply floating in the harbor, with no one allowed to get on. This person then sent me some videos of Italian officials walking around a dock in a calm and unhurried manner.

The real drama seems to happen either before or after the yachts are seized. For instance, one Russian-owned superyacht, the Ragnar, got stuck in Norway because port workers refused to refuel it. A group of young Ukrainian sailors motored out to protest the billionaire Chelsea F.C. owner Roman Abramovich’s superyacht as it docked in Turkey, shouting, “Go away, Russian ship!” and “No war in Ukraine!” The Ukrainian chief engineer of the Lady Anastasia, which news reports say belongs to the Russian oligarch Alexander Mikheev, tried to sink the ship while it was docked in Mallorca by opening up the valves in her engine room. (All boats are female, even the ones violating international law.) Spanish authorities soon arrived to pump out the water and arrest the engineer.

European countries have seized the most yachts so far, but the U.S. Justice Department has also launched a task force that aims, in part, to seize Russian yachts. When I asked about this operation—called KleptoCapture—the agency responded with an email saying, “DOJ is interested in identifying all properties of sanctioned oligarchs and ensuring, to the extent possible, that those assets are ‘blocked’ from use or enjoyment.” If a yacht can be traced to criminal conduct, the agency said, “DOJ is interested in going further, where possible, and actually forfeiting the property.” On Monday, U.S. federal agents seized their first such yacht, the 255-foot-long Tango, owned by the billionaire Putin ally Viktor Vekselberg, at a port on a Spanish island. (That seizure footage , too, showed Spanish and American cops quietly standing around the yacht’s wheelhouse with their arms folded.) “Today marks our taskforce’s first seizure of an asset belonging to a sanctioned individual with close ties to the Russian regime,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press release. “It will not be the last.”

Dealing with these seized yachts, though, can be kind of a headache. If left in brackish water for months, the boats’ hulls will corrode and, eventually, the yachts could sink. “If the ultraviolet light from the sun causes seals around the windows to perish, then you’ll get freshwater ingress from rain,” says Benjamin Maltby, a partner at Keystone Law who specializes in yachts. This could become an issue for the countries doing the seizing. “If in a year or two’s time the owner turns up and finds that these yachts are not in good condition, then there will almost certainly be a claim arising,” Maltby told me. In France, La Ciotat Shipyards told Reuters that it doesn’t know whom to bill for the mooring fees of the Amore Vero, a seized superyacht said to be owned by the oligarch Igor Sechin.

When the U.S. government seizes, say, a Lexus or a helicopter from a drug dealer, it takes on the cost of storing and maintaining it. “The government doesn’t own it yet,” says Stef Cassella, an expert on asset-forfeiture law . “It still belongs to the other guy, and he might get it back. And if he gets it back, then he has a right to get it back in the same condition that it was in before it was seized from him. Otherwise he gets to sue the government for damages.” Occasionally, the feds will pay a contractor to, say, mow the lawn of an alleged drug kingpin’s mansion or half-heartedly run the small business that was previously a front for money laundering.

Sometimes, U.S. marshals, who are the custodians of seized property, place yachts in dry storage facilities, where they are less likely to deteriorate. The oligarchs’ boats are too big for that, though; they have to be kept in the water. Still, “U.S. marshals don’t want to crew a yacht,” Cassella told me. Apathetic bureaucrats tend not to be as conscientious about yacht maintenance as the boats’ Russian oil-magnate owners. The government might opt to just reach an agreement with the oligarch to maintain the yacht while it’s under seizure.

Because of these upkeep challenges, the government typically tries to avoid seizing things that are too high-maintenance. After a few cases in which prosecutors seized thoroughbred horses, then were stuck having to feed and groom several criminally implicated equines, the government handed down a new rule of thumb: “If it eats, don’t seize it,” says Steven Welk, the former asset-forfeiture chief in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

To permanently take a yacht, as opposed to just keeping its owner from using it, American authorities must show that the boat is connected to criminal activity. A billionaire oligarch would surely challenge such a claim, and he may get his yacht back eventually. If he loses and forfeits his yacht, the government would put it up for auction, at which point anyone could buy it, other than government employees and the oligarch himself.

But that’s if the Justice Department is able to yank the yachts out of foreign waters in the first place. Because European countries have been cooperating with the Americans, several oligarchs’ yachts have sped away from the Mediterranean and over to Turkey or Dubai, which are seen as friendlier to Russia. Some of the yachts stopped “pinging”—sending marine-traffic data—then resurfaced near Russia itself . “One yacht, for example, Nord, had pinged down around the Maldives, and then she disappeared for several days and finally reappeared, clearly making her way through the straits of Malaysia and up toward Vladivostok,” Finley said.

Foreign governments are not always as helpful as U.S. authorities wish they would be. During his time as a prosecutor, Welk once tried to seize a $2 million yacht, the Rive de Mer, that belonged to an American fraudster who had fled to Mexico aboard the boat. Welk asked Mexican officials to arrest the man and surrender the yacht to U.S. officials. “They did grab him and bring him to Tijuana and give him to us,” Welk said. “But they kept his yacht.”

A few years later, Welk got a call from a yacht broker in Panama who had bought the fraudster’s boat from the Mexican government.

“What would happen if somebody bought that yacht and brought it to the United States?” the broker asked.

“If I know where it is, and it’s in U.S. waters, I’m going to take it,” Welk said.

But he never heard anything more about it, so he never did.

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Over $2 billion worth of yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs have been seized in Europe so far

• At least 13 luxury boats have been seized in Europe since Putin launched a war on Ukraine.
• The mega yachts are linked to Russian oligarchs and are valued between $8 million and $606 million.
• Not all yachts have been seized, as some billionaires moved their vessels elsewhere.

More than $2 billion worth of mega yachts linked to Russian billionaires have been seized in Europe since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war on Ukraine in late February, Bloomberg reported.

At least 13 yachts valued between $8 million and $606 million have been seized or impounded in the EU and UK as officials continue to sanction Russia's elite, according to the outlet.

The US, alongside the UK and EU, imposed economic sanctions on Russian oligarchs — many of whom moved their mega yachts to regions where they cannot be seized, including the Maldives.

It can be tricky to pin down the owners of the yachts, but enough "public speculation" suggesting a Russian oligarch is the owner is typically "sufficient for a seizure," Insider's Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Hillary Hoffower reported. 

Spain is reportedly holding four of these yachts, including the $8 million Lady Anastasia linked to Alexander Mikheev, the $95 million Valerie linked to Sergei Chemezov, the $95 million vessel Tango linked to Viktor Vekselberg, and the $468 million yacht Crescent linked to Igor Sechin.

France holds three more vessels, including another yacht worth $125 million also linked to Sechin called the Amore Vero. The country is also holding two yachts linked to Alexey Kuzmichev — the $22 million Little Bear and the $77 million Big Bear.

Italy is reportedly holding the $34 million Lady M, which is linked to Alexei Mordashov; the $575 million Sailing Yacht A, which is linked to Andrey Melnichenko; and the $38 million Lena, which is linked to Gennady Timchenko.

Germany holds the largest ship, the Dilbar, which is linked to Alisher Usmanov and valued at $606 million. Gibraltar, a British territory, is holding the $68 million Axioma, which is linked to Dmitry Pumpyansky, while England has taken control of the $38 million Phi, linked to Vitaly Kochetkov.

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Biden is vowing to seize Russian oligarchs’ yachts. Here’s where they are right now

The ships span the length of a football field or longer, come outfitted with helipads and swimming pools, and have shown up at ports around the world – towering over nearby fishing vessels and motorboats like giants.  

Yachts owned by Russian oligarchs – who have bought some of the largest and most extravagant “superyachts” on the planet – are gleaming symbols of how Russia’s elite have profited under the government of President Vladimir Putin.

Now, as Russian forces ramp up their deadly military campaign in Ukraine, the yachts are emerging as key targets of the US and European allies, who are vowing to seize property owned by Putin’s enablers.

Disputes are already erupting: French officials seized a yacht Wednesday night that they said was linked to Igor Sechin, a sanctioned Russian oil executive and close Putin associate, as it was preparing to flee a port. But the company that manages the ship denied Sechin was the owner. And the White House said German officials had seized another oligarch’s yacht in Hamburg, while local authorities denied any ships had been confiscated.

The French seizure shows that confiscating oligarchs’ yachts will require a concerted global effort – and it’s likely to mean protracted legal battles around the world, experts said.

A CNN review of maritime location data from the website MarineTraffic found that more than a dozen yachts that have been reported to be owned by Russian oligarchs are spread out across the world, from the crystal waters of Antigua to ports in Barcelona and Hamburg to atolls in the Maldives and Seychelles.  

In several cases, the billionaires’ yachts have been on the move in the days since the Russian offensive began.

Meanwhile, officials around the world are also enforcing sanctions on a far less flashy but still important group of vessels: oil tankers and container ships the US Treasury Department says are owned by the subsidiary of a bank with close ties to Russia’s defense industry. French authorities intercepted one of the cargo ships last weekend, and a Malaysian port refused to let another dock.

Related video Former Russian oligarch says more sanctions should be imposed on Putin's inner circle

Sanctions and asset seizures “make it more difficult for the Kremlin to persuade capable people of getting involved in its activities and thereby weaken the grip of the Kremlin over elites,” said William Courtney, a former US ambassador and current executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum, whose members include Russian and Western leaders.

President Joe Biden put the Russian elite on notice in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night. 

“To the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: No more,” Biden declared . “We are joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We’re coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

The US Department of Justice launched a new task force – dubbed KleptoCapture – to help put Biden’s words into action. The effort includes prosecutors, federal agents and experts in money laundering, tax enforcement and national security investigations from the FBI, the IRS, the US Marshals Service, and the US Postal Inspection Service, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Wednesday.

“We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue this unjust war,” Garland said.

Russian-tied yachts docked around the world

Yacht ownership is extremely difficult to confirm, with the ships often registered to management companies or shell corporations in an apparent effort to disguise ownership, experts say. 

But more than a dozen of the billionaires included in a list of Russian “oligarchs” the Treasury Department released in 2018 have been tied to yachts in media reports in recent years, according to a CNN review. 

Most of the oligarchs who reportedly own yachts are not yet facing US sanctions. However, some have been sanctioned by the European Union or the United Kingdom, and could be added to US sanctions lists as well. 

Amber Vitale, a former official with the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces sanctions, said that US sanctions generally only prevent Americans and American companies from interacting with sanctioned individuals. That means the oligarchs’ yachts could be safe from seizure if they stay in international waters or in countries that haven’t issued their own sanctions. 

“However, it would get very difficult to operate for long if many allied nations impose similar prohibitions,” Vitale said in an email. “Vessels need ports, fuel, operators/captains, repairs and supplies. Without access to these things they could be stuck floating at sea waiting for rescue or resolution.”

The seizures have already begun, with French officials taking the Amore Vero , the yacht they said is owned by Sechin, according to a statement from France’s Ministry of Economy and Finance. The yacht arrived at the French port of La Ciotat on January 3 for repairs, but was “making arrangements to sail urgently, without having completed the planned work” when it was seized on Wednesday, the ministry said. Sechin, the CEO of the Russian oil company Rosneft, was sanctioned by the EU earlier this week, and Rosneft itself was sanctioned by the US in 2014 .

But a yacht management company associated with the ship denied Sechin owned it. “I can absolutely say that Igor Sechin is not the owner,” a spokesperson for Imperial Yachts, which manages the Amore Vero, told CNN. “The rightful owner is appealing the decision to seize the vessel.”

Legal experts told CNN that oligarchs were likely to transfer assets such as yachts to friends or family who aren’t sanctioned to try to prevent them from being seized. Catherine Belton, the author of a book on Putin, said she expected oligarchs were “feverishly engineering deals where ownership changes could be triggered.”

“It’s going to be a game of cat and mouse,” she said.

The French ministry said that the Amore Vero, which has an onboard gym and beauty salon and won an award for yacht design, is owned by a company whose “main shareholder” is Sechin. Sechin served as Russia’s deputy prime minister in Putin’s cabinet before becoming CEO of Rosneft, one of the country’s largest companies, in 2012.

The seizure may also scare other Russian oligarchs into getting their ships out of EU ports. The Dilbar, one of the largest yachts in the world, which is reportedly owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, arrived in Hamburg, Germany in late October, according to MarineTraffic data. There was confusion about the ship’s status on Thursday: Usmanov was sanctioned by the EU earlier this week, and Forbes reported that German authorities had seized the 156-meter ship, which can carry up to 96 crew members and 24 guests. The US Treasury Department also sanctioned Usmanov on Thursday, specifically calling out the Dilbar as evidence of his “luxurious lifestyle.”

But a spokesperson for the Hamburg economic authority told CNN Thursday that “no yacht has been seized by authorities or customs at the port in Hamburg at this moment in time.” German customs officials did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, and the shipbuilding company that reportedly had been refitting the yacht declined to comment.

The Luna, a yacht reportedly owned by Farkhad Akhmedov, an Azerbaijani billionaire who previously led a Russian natural gas company, was also in Hamburg as of the latest MarineTraffic data from earlier this week. Akhmedov, who has not been sanctioned, kept the nine-deck, 115-meter Luna after an acrimonious divorce that was the largest divorce case heard in Britain’s legal history.  The yacht features missile detection technology and bulletproof windows.

Several yachts reportedly owned by Russian oligarchs have been docked at a port in Barcelona , including the Solaris, which has been tied to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who announced Wednesday that he would sell the Chelsea Football Club and donate proceeds to a foundation for people impacted by the invasion of Ukraine. Abramovich hasn’t been sanctioned.

The Galactica Super Nova, reportedly owned by Russian oil company executive Vagit Alekperov, left Barcelona on Saturday and crossed the Mediterranean to Tivat, Montenegro, before sailing south into the Adriatic Sea. While Alekperov hasn’t been sanctioned, he is president of Lukoil, which has been hit by US sanctions in the past.

Other Russian-linked yachts are in the Caribbean, including Eclipse, another yacht owned by Abramovich, which is among the world’s largest and includes a swimming pool that can be transformed into a dance floor, and the Anna, reportedly owned by oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who once purchased a Florida mansion from former President Donald Trump. Rybolovlev hasn’t been sanctioned.

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Courtney, the former ambassador, said that he expected Russian oligarchs took most of their assets out of the US after two billionaires were sanctioned in 2018, and predicted that they would try to move their yachts out of Western European countries to avoid them being seized.

“We are likely to see more of a redistribution geographically of some of those assets,” Courtney said, to countries “that are seen as less likely to sanction,” possibly in the Middle East.  

Several yachts connected to Russian oligarchs have arrived in recent weeks in the Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago nation. They include the Clio, reportedly owned by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, which left Sri Lanka in early February and has been sailing between various Maldives atolls since then, according to MarineTraffic. Deripaska was sanctioned by the US in 2018.

None of the oligarchs mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment from CNN sent to their spokespeople, businesses or lawyers. 

Perhaps the clearest example of a yacht with supposed ties to the Russian elite fleeing the West is a Russian-flagged ship named Graceful. Speculative news articles in the German media have reported that the ship belongs to Putin himself, although there’s no concrete evidence that that’s the case. 

Graceful departed Hamburg in early February – roughly two weeks before the invasion of Ukraine – and sped to Kaliningrad, Russia, the MarineTraffic data shows. No location data has been recorded since it arrived in the Russian city on February 9. 

Hackers last week successfully altered maritime traffic data to make it appear that the yacht’s destination was “hell” and it had run aground on Snake Island in Ukraine – where Ukrainian soldiers’ profane response to a Russian warship went viral on social media. 

Sanctions will likely spark legal battles over the yachts, and require government officials to prove ownership, experts said. 

“A sanctioned person may say to the government that the asset you have frozen is not one of my assets,” arguing that it is registered in a family member’s name or a shell corporation that has not specifically been sanctioned, said Raj Bhala, a professor at the University of Kansas Law School and a sanctions expert. “The oligarch could argue before the government that you don’t really have the legal authority to seize my asset.”

But there are new dangers for the oligarchs’ yachts beyond legal proceedings: A Ukrainian ship engineer was arrested in the Spanish island of Mallorca for trying to sink a yacht owned by a Russian military export company executive, local news outlets reported.

“I don’t regret anything I’ve done and I would do it again,” the engineer declared in court on Sunday, according to the Majorca Daily Bulletin . “They were attacking innocents.”

Sanctioned shipping vessels seized, blocked from ports 

Even as Biden and other officials have focused their public comments on oligarchs’ yachts, the US is also going after other shipping vessels with ties to Russia . 

Last week, the Biden administration announced sanctions against five oil, cargo and container ships that the Treasury Department says are owned by a subsidiary of Promsvyazbank, a Russian bank that has given billions of dollars to support Russian defense companies. The sanctions block any Americans from doing business with Promsvyazbank.

French authorities seized one of the cargo ships, the Baltic Leader, on Saturday as it was headed from France to Saint Petersburg, Russia, “as part of an operation carried out in cooperation with US authorities,” according to France’s finance ministry . The ship is now anchored at a port in northern France, MarineTraffic data shows.

A port operator in Malaysia declined the request of one of the other vessels, an oil tanker named Linda, to dock there on March 5 “in order not to violate any sanctions,” Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport told CNN. The decision was first reported by Reuters . 

Promsvyazbank did not respond to CNN’s request for comment, but has publicly denied that its subsidiary owned the Linda, and said it no longer owns the Baltic Leader. Two of the other US-sanctioned ships are now in the process of having their leases withdrawn from Promsvyazbank’s subsidiary, according to a statement from Russian company FESCO Transportation Group.

Some of the ships have been accused in recent years of violating past US sanctions by transporting Iranian oil. A Turkish petroleum company had agreed to service another one of the ships – an oil tanker named Pegas – at one of its terminals earlier this year, but after receiving a report that the ship may have been carrying Iranian cargo, the transaction was canceled, according to a spokesperson for the company, Opet. 

CNN’s Majlie de Puy Kamp and Nadine Schmidt contributed to this report.

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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.

March 23, 2022

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