: Fleeing sanctions, Russian oligarchs seek safe ports for their superyachts #IndiaNEWS #Feature Washington: The superyacht Dilbar stretches one-and-a-half football fields in length. It has two helipads,

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Fleeing sanctions, Russian oligarchs seek safe ports for their superyachts #IndiaNEWS #Feature
Washington: The superyacht Dilbar stretches one-and-a-half football fields in length. It has two helipads, berths for more than 130 people and a 25-meter swimming pool that itself can accommodate another superyacht.
Dilbar was launched in 2016 at a reported cost of more than 8 million. Five years later, its purported owner, the Kremlin-aligned Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, was already dissatisfied. He sent the vessel to a German shipyard last fall for a retrofit reportedly costing several hundred million dollars.
Dilbar was in drydock Thursday when the United States and European Union announced economic sanctions against Usmanov — a metals magnate and early investor in Facebook — over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and in retaliation for the Kremlins invasion of Ukraine.
“We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,� President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, addressing Russian oligarchs. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains. �
Seizing the behemoth boats could prove challenging. Russian billionaires have had decades to shield their money and assets in the West from governments that might try to tax or seize them.
Several media outlets reported last week that German authorities had impounded the Dilbar. But a spokeswoman for Hamburg states economy ministry told The Associated Press no such action had yet been taken because it had been unable to establish ownership of the yacht.
Dilbar is flagged in the Cayman Islands and registered to a holding company in Malta, banking havens where the global ultra-rich often park their wealth.
Working with the U. K. -based yacht valuation firm VesselsValue, the AP compiled a list of 56 superyachts — generally defined as luxury vessels exceeding 24 meters (79 feet) in length — believed to be owned by a few dozen Kremlin-aligned oligarchs. The yachts have a combined market value estimated at more than . 4 billion.
The AP then used two online services — VesselFinder and MarineTraffic — to plot the last known locations of the yachts as relayed by their onboard tracking beacons.
Many are anchored in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. But more than a dozen were underway or had already arrived in remote ports in small nations such as the Maldives and Montenegro, potentially beyond the reach of Western sanctions. Three had gone dark, their transponders last pinging just outside the Bosporus in Turkey — gateway to the Black Sea and the southern Russian ports of Sochi and Novorossiysk.
Graceful, a German-built Russian-flagged superyacht believed to belong to Putin, left a repair yard in Hamburg, Germany, on Feb.

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