On the morning of March 29 2022, Captain Guy Booth was working aboard Phi, a 192ft aquamarine superyacht moored in London’s Canary Wharf, when he heard a commotion below. Down on the pier a car had pulled up and Grant Shapps, then the UK’s transport secretary, emerged from the vehicle, followed by a retinue of aides.
“The first thing we saw was his entourage, several men and women carrying clipboards and make-up and hairbrushes,” says Booth.
Shapps and his team then began to shoot a video for the social media network TikTok, where the government minister announced that Phi — built in 2021 by the famed Dutch luxury shipbuilder Royal Huisman and worth an estimated £38mn — “belongs to a Russian oligarch, friends of Putin”.
Booth watched in amazement as several television crews who’d been tipped off about the news arrived at the scene. “Shapps was positioning himself like a big game hunter, checking his best angle,” says Booth. “They took several takes.”
Next, a black cab arrived and three officers from the UK’s National Crime Agency got out. They climbed aboard and handed Booth a brown envelope. Inside was a government order: the boat he captained was now detained for being “owned by persons connected with Russia”.
Today, Phi is still moored in the same spot in Canary Wharf outside an Indian restaurant, and with a small skeleton crew aboard. Each day, Booth, along with two engineers, a chief officer, a crew cook and two deck hands wake up on board and dutifully service the vessel.
Its once feted “infinite wine cellar” and seven-metre swimming pool lie unused. A lonely sun lounger sits out on deck, and the yacht’s Maltese maritime flag droops. Pink paint has been applied to its roof to protect it from the risk of dust from nearby building sites.
Paul Dickie, a lawyer at Jaffa & Co who has represented Phi, claims the boat has been targeted by squatters. A notice on its side warns any would-be trespassers that they will be prosecuted “to the full extent of the law”.
Phi’s owner, a Russian businessman called Sergei Naumenko, has repeatedly denied any connection to Vladimir Putin or the Russian state, and has twice unsuccessfully appealed to the English courts to have the yacht released.
In May 2023 an English High Court judge said Shapps’s TikTok video claims that the owner had “close connections to Putin” were “excusable political hyperbole”. The Court of Appeal in March this year said it was “troubled” by Shapps’s “incorrect” statements. Both courts, however, upheld the UK detention order for the vessel.
After Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted western governments to unleash an avalanche of economic sanctions against Russian oligarchs, there are now multiple superyachts like Phi trapped in ports around the world. Several are stuck in seemingly never-ending legal quagmires, with vastly expensive lawyers hired by often opaque offshore owners battling for their release.
Although tens of billions of dollars of Russian-owned luxury assets, including mansions, luxury cars and private jets, have been frozen, it was the symbolism of the seizure of the oligarch superyachts — vast, floating Versailles palaces often worth hundreds of millions of dollars — that captured the public’s imagination. Anti-corruption campaigners hoped at the time that these vessels would be auctioned off and the proceeds could be donated to Ukraine.
Yet more than two years on from the start of the war, the future of these superyachts remains unresolved. Once prized trophies in the west’s co-ordinated response to Russia’s aggression, some have racked up vast maintenance costs for taxpayers, had their angry crews turn fire hoses and drones on snooping reporters, and been the target of sabotage plots by anti-war activists.
For western governments, resolving the fate of these superyachts will be a high-stakes test of the effectiveness of economic sanctions. For lawyers working for the oligarchs who own them, the seizures are acts of modern piracy.
Perhaps no single vessel exemplifies the array of headaches that seized superyachts have caused western governments more than the Amadea — a $300mn, 348ft boat detained by the US authorities in Fiji in 2022.
Such is its gaudy opulence that the Amadea could be a pastiche of an oligarch’s fantasies. According to a 2021 profile in Boat International, it boasts a Pleyel piano with 24-carat gold pedals, a swimming pool that converts into a stage for DJs, hand-painted Michelangelo clouds on the dining-room ceiling, a lobster tank and a helipad.
When the US Department of Justice seized the Amadea, it claimed that it was owned by the sanctioned Dagestan-born gold magnate Suleiman Kerimov. The DoJ said he was “part of a group of Russian oligarchs who profit from the Russian government through corruption and its malign activity around the globe”.
Deputy US attorney-general Lisa Monaco announced at the time that the seizure “should tell every corrupt Russian oligarch that they cannot hide”. Not long after Amadea was seized in Fiji, she told the Aspen Security Forum that investigators had even discovered an “alleged Fabergé egg” aboard. It was later found to be an imitation.
The Amadea was then moved by the US authorities from Fiji to San Diego, where it is currently moored. The US government last October brought a civil forfeiture case against the superyacht based on its claim that it was owned by Kerimov.
During the time the Amadea has been stuck in San Diego, it has racked up maintenance bills of $740,000 a month, or almost $9mn a year, to be paid by the US government. Because of this, the Department of Justice moved to try to sell the boat, arguing that the costs it was incurring were “excessive”.
Superyachts require constant maintenance and upkeep to keep their seaworthiness, let alone their value. Crew salaries and vast mooring fees must be paid. Hulls must be scraped, engines must be cleaned.
“The water here is brackish, half freshwater and half seawater, so things grow in it,” Booth says about Phi. “We are constantly having to remove biological marine growth from the filters. The teak decks require constant daily attention.”
Sabotage is also a risk. Lady Anastasia, a yacht seized in Mallorca and owned by the CEO of the Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport Alexander Mikheev, in February 2022 was almost destroyed by a Ukrainian mechanic working on the boat who tried to intentionally sink it.
Some boats have simply disappeared. In the summer of 2022, two yachts owned by Dmitry Mazepin, another sanctioned Russian billionaire, vanished from the Sardinian port of Olbia. An investigation by Italy’s financial police, which had seized both yachts shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, found that one had made a stopover in Tunisia before vanishing, while the other was spotted sailing towards Turkey. In response, Italy has hit Mazepin with fines, which remain unpaid.
Booth says he believes Phi has suffered significant damage, as well as lost charter earnings, as a result of being stuck in Canary Wharf. “I am not at liberty to discuss the exact figure,” he says, “but it is huge. We are talking tens of millions of pounds.”
Because of the freezing order, Phi’s Dutch manufacturer is unable to perform warranty work on the yacht. One of many issues, Booth says, is that he has been unable to fix faulty fire protection systems.
“We have 60,000 litres of diesel on board. If there are problems with the fire detection systems, that could be very dangerous. Exceptionally dangerous. You could have an ecological disaster in central London. You can’t get a fire engine in here.”
In Phi’s case, the costs are all borne by its Russian owner, who — unlike many other owners of frozen yachts — is not sanctioned and has not been proven to have any meaningful connection to the Russian state. He will be able to get this money back from the UK government only if the restriction order is overturned and he can then win a successful damages claim.
For other superyachts, the burden of paying for upkeep falls on the countries where they are being held. Lady M, a yacht owned by the sanctioned Russian steel and mining magnate Alexei Mordashov, has been blocked from leaving the Italian port of Imperia as one of seven yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs in the country.
Another, Sailing Yacht A, designed by Philippe Starck and, at 468ft long, one of the largest private sail-assisted motor yachts in the world, is currently impounded in the port of Trieste. Alleged by the Italian state to be owned by the sanctioned Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, the boat is estimated to have cost the Italian taxpayer more than €18mn in upkeep, according to the local newspaper Il Piccolo. Lawyers for Melnichenko have said he does not personally own the yacht, and instead it is controlled by a trust that has no connection to him.
Costs aside, seizing a superyacht is simple enough, provided it is in the right place. At the time of the invasion, the only way for sanctioned Russian oligarchs to protect their yachts was to be lucky or shrewd enough to not have them in territories or waters where they could be captured. In March 2022, two superyachts belonging to Roman Abramovich, one of them featuring an onboard missile defence system and anti-paparazzi “laser shield”, sailed away from Europe towards Turkey and remain free to this day.
But in an industry where it is common to own vessels through cascades of offshore companies and anonymous trusts, a far trickier task for investigators can be to prove in court who really owns a superyacht once it has been detained.
In the case of the Amadea, the US government has been battling in court to prove that Kerimov is its true owner before it can be allowed to sell the yacht and stop paying the vast costs of its upkeep.
The Department of Justice appeared to have strong evidence to back up its claims, including records showing that Kerimov’s family spent large amounts of time on the Amadea, and that his children had requested structural modifications to the superyacht.
However, Kerimov denied ownership. Instead, a different wealthy Russian, Eduard Khudainatov, a former chief executive of the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft, stepped forward to claim that he, in fact, was the true owner of the Amadea and the seizure was unlawful.
“When you need records from overseas, when you are dealing with shell companies in secrecy jurisdictions, or people are hiding behind nominee owners, it’s going to take a long time,” says Stefan Cassella, a former federal prosecutor who served 30 years in the US Department of Justice specialising in asset forfeiture.
Cassella says these sorts of legal tussles over who owns an asset that has been seized by a government are common. The difference in the case of oligarch-owned superyachts is the legal resources available to the owners fighting the seizures, the size and value of the assets, and the cost to the taxpayer of keeping them afloat.
“We litigate this all the time,” Cassella tells me. “Say a drug agent sees a dealer dealing from a Mercedes car and they want to seize it. He claims it’s not his car, that his mother or sister owns it. We then need to litigate with that person to see if they are really the owner. Who pays the insurance? Who brought it in to get oil changed? Whose garage is it sitting in? This is the same, just on a much larger scale.”
The US responded in a court filing to Khudainatov’s claim to own the Amadea by accusing him of being a “clean, unsanctioned straw owner” serving as a front for Kerimov. Khudainatov’s lawyers have denied he is a straw owner and say he is the legal owner of the yacht.
The picture was further muddied when it was alleged by the US in court documents that Khudainatov, who in June 2022 was placed under EU sanctions, was the fake owner of another, even more valuable and mysterious super yacht, the Scheherazade — which he has denied.
The Scheherazade, one of the longest yachts in the world, worth an estimated $700mn, was seized by the Italian authorities in the Tuscan port of Marina di Carrara in May 2022 because of its suspected “meaningful economic and business connections with prominent elements of the Russian government subject to EU sanctions”.
In 2022 the now deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation that claimed that the Scheherazade was in fact owned by Putin himself, based on the fact that many of its crew were agents of the Federal Protective Service, a state security unit responsible for the Russian president’s personal safety.
The US authorities have argued it is impossible that one man could own so many yachts, writing in court documents that “there is no reason to believe [Khudainatov] has the financial resources to purchase the Amadea and the Scheherazade, or is there any apparent reason why a single individual would own multiple superyachts of their size”.
Whoever is the true owner of the Scheherazade, they have not let its seizure dim their ambitions. During the time it has been held in Tuscany, the Italian government has allowed the owner to pay for an expensive refurbishment. It is a decoration job that the owner clearly wants to conduct in privacy. When reporters from Radio Free Europe tried to get close to the vessel earlier this year the Scheherazade’s crew turned on fire hoses, and deployed a drone to follow them.
Meanwhile, last month a New York court ruled that the US government was not allowed to sell the Amadea, meaning that US taxpayers will have to continue for now to foot the bill for its upkeep.
Even if governments are able to establish ownership and get court permission to sell a superyacht, further legal complexities can make finding a buyer difficult. In June 2023 the Alfa Nero, a yacht alleged to be owned by the US-sanctioned phosphate billionaire Andrey Guryev, which has been impounded in Falmouth Harbor, Antigua, was sold at auction for $67mn to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
The deal later fell apart, with the US ambassador to Antigua announcing that Schmidt backed out of the purchase because he was worried about future legal problems if he bought it.
Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov, Guryev’s daughter, this year launched a challenge to the Antiguan government’s decision to seize and sell the Alfa Nero, claiming that she is the sole beneficiary of the trust that owns the yacht, rather than her father. The case is expected to be heard in September.
Back in the UK, Booth, the captain if Phi, believes that the yacht and its owner have been unfairly caught up in events outside of their control. “He’s not a billionaire, he’s never met Putin,” Booth says of Phi’s owner Sergei Naumenko. “He’s against the war. He’s just a private Russian gentleman who likes boats.”
Phi will make another bid to be freed in the UK’s Supreme Court, in an appeal to be heard next January.
Captain Booth says he will not desert his ship. “My team and I have remained on board, remained loyal. I’ve won numerous awards for what I do in my industry. I could have left almost straight away, and said, ‘This is not my bag, I’m off to captain another superyacht in the Med’ . . . I would not sleep well at night if I abandoned this owner.”
But Booth and his crew may be waiting a long time. Cassella, the forfeiture lawyer, says he expects many cases to drag on for as long as a decade. “I thought two years ago when all the superyachts were seized that 10 years was an appropriate timeframe,” he says. “This is not going to be resolved any time soon.”
Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the FT. His book ‘Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Drugs, War and The Secret World of International Crime’ is now out in paperback
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