A #YachtWatch Update: Amadea for sale?
Turns out, owning a mega yacht is expensive.
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
They say the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells it.
After a euphoric win in the Fijian courts, the US government seized the mega yacht Amadea in 2022 and sailed her triumphantly to San Diego, where reality quickly settled in: maintaining a 348-foot luxury vessel is really fucking expensive. As a result, the USG is looking to sell the yacht, even before a civil forfeiture case pending in federal court in New York is resolved. That would leave the parties arguing over the forfeiture of the proceeds of the sale of the yacht, rather than the physical yacht itself.
A quick recap: The USG believes Amadea is owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov. Kerimov denies this. A different super-rich Russian, Eduard Khudainatov, who is not sanctioned in the United States, says the yacht is actually his, and he’d very much like it back, please. The two sides are now duking it out in court. For more background on the Amadea, see this article and this twitter thread.
Khudainatov is an interesting character (see this Twitter thread). He doesn’t appear on any Russian rich list, yet he claims in court filings to own more than a billion dollars’ worth of yachts. They also happen to be some of the most interesting yachts in the Russian oligarch fleet:
Amadea, which was in the Caribbean when the war in Ukraine began and which made a quick getaway through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific when sanctions were announced. It was rumored to be on its way to Russia when it stopped in Fiji to resupply. The yacht is worth $325 million.
Scheherazade, seized by Italian officials and believed to be one of Putin’s yachts. It is worth an estimated $700 million.
Crescent, the sister ship of Scheherazade, was seized by Spanish authorities, who believed it was owned by oligarch Igor Sechin. The yacht was boarded by the FBI, which conducted a five-hour search of the vessel last year. It is worth an estimated $600 million.
All three yachts are (or were) managed by Imperial Yachts of Monaco, whose CEO, Evgeny Kochman, has also been sanctioned by the US and who is allegedly an integral player in the world of Russian yachts and its associated money laundering and sanctions evading activities.
According to court documents, the Amadea is costing the US one million dollars a month to maintain.
As a consequence, the US would like to sell the yacht while the civil forfeiture case against Kerimov continues. The case is bound to take time, since it involves proving that Kerimov is the ultimate beneficial owner, even though Khudainatov claims he is.
The judge in the case recently ordered the two parties to work out the maintenance fees for the yacht. If Khudainatov takes over paying for maintenance, that might delay a sale. On the other hand, the judge might rule no sale can take place until the question of ownership is settled.
The Financial Times recently reported that Italian officials are allowing maintenance fees for Scheherazade to be paid by that vessel’s owner, but they have not revealed that person or entity’s identity. Is it Khudainatov?
If Khudainatov is the owner of all these yachts, where did he get the money to buy them and pay their maintenance fees? And if he really can afford all that, how did he escape the attention of every Russia rich list out there?
A $20 Million Charter and a Potential Laundry Machine
Khudainatov insists he has never met Suleyman Kerimov but that Kerimov’s daughter chartered Amadea for 20 weeks in 2022-2023 for a total of about $20 million. Why, he asks in a court filing, would Kerimov’s daughter pay to charter the yacht if the yacht belonged to her dad?
“Had Kerimov actually purchased the yacht, it follows that his adult daughter would not have had to charter the vessel, particularly from Mr. Khudainatov’s broker. Thus, the fact that Ms. Kerimova chartered the vessel from an entity unconnected to her father is plain evidence that her father did not own the vessel.”
Except, if one is laundering money, this is precisely how one might go about it.
Khudainatov also relies on numerous documents from Imperial Yachts to make his case that he is the true owner. However, as I noted above, it is likely the yacht management company is complicit in the money laundering and sanctions evasion and thus provided whatever documents were necessary to hide the identity of the yacht’s true owner.
We have seen another yacht management company do exactly this (allegedly) in the case of a different seized yacht, the Tango, believed to be owned by Viktor Vekselberg and currently detained in Spain. In the case of Tango, the US claims the yacht management company of that vessel forged a number of documents to hide the fact that Vekselberg is the owner. You can read the details of the scheme here:
Prosecutors in the Amadea case believe it will take several months to prove that Kerimov, not Khudainatov, is the true owner of the yacht. A decision about whether or not the US can proceed with a sale of the vessel before the forfeiture case is finalized will likely come before then.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of stories you should be reading
RUSSIA
Time to Criminalize Putin’s Lie Machine (CEPA)
Russian professor arrested in Estonia on espionage charges (The Guardian)
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
I was in Nice in November (Russian language menus!) and visited Antibes!. Thought of you of course. We didn’t see the MEGA yachts as they were sort of hidden by a wall. So just saw poor people yachts.