She cost $325m (£258m) to build, and millions more each year to run. When not at sea, the Amadea superyacht requires a crew of 24 deckhands and engineers to keep her shipshape.
In written evidence to a court in Fiji, where the vessel has been the subject of a legal battle over which Russian oligarch she belongs to, her captain listed the costly, and perishable materials: marble, gilded metal fittings, sensitive carpets, silk, precious woods and leathers, teak decking, mirror polished stainless steel and a high gloss paint system.
Without the right care, and the kind of temperature and humidity controls normally used to preserve valuable artworks, the captain said the Amadea would “rapidly deteriorate”, leaving “an unsaleable hull”. He put the cost of simply keeping her in dry dock at $1.1m per month. “There are a very, very limited number of buyers who can afford her upkeep, let alone her purchase price,” he explained.
The identity of that buyer will now be settled in a US court. Seized during a voyage in the South Pacific at the request of the US authorities, the Amadea has spent the last few weeks docked in Lautoka Wharf in Fiji, awaiting the outcome of a legal dispute between the Department of Justice in the US and the British Virgin Islands company in whose name she is registered.
Fiji’s supreme court ruled on Tuesday morning that the vessel could be handed to the US authorities, and the Amadea is now headed for America.
Lawyers acting for a previously low-profile Russian oil boss, Eduard Khudainatov, insist he is the owner. They say he is the settlor of a trust, established under English law, which ultimately holds the vessel through a twisting trail of offshore companies. American officials allege Khudainatov is merely a stand-in. They say the Amadea belongs to one of Russia’s richest men, the gold tycoon Suleiman Kerimov, who is currently subject to western sanctions.
The case is significant because America has raised the question of whether Khudainatov may be fronting as the owner of another, even more valuable mega-yacht. The $700m Scheherazade, with its six decks and two helipads, was seized in Tuscany following the invasion of Ukraine. Khudainatov is reported to hold the yacht via another offshore structure, but he has not confirmed this, leaving its true ownership even less certain than the Amadea. The Italian police are investigating claims that the vessel may ultimately belong to Vladimir Putin, who like Kerimov is now blacklisted in Europe and the US.
The combined value of both yachts is $1bn.
In court documents, US authorities said the fact that Khudainatov “is being held out as the owner of the two largest superyachts on record, both linked to sanctioned individuals” suggested he was being used as a “clean, unsanctioned straw owner to conceal the true beneficial owners of these vessels”.
The 61-year-old businessman’s links with Putin date back to his first presidential campaign, in 2000, which Khudainatov helped organise. A one-time pig breeder from Kazakhstan, he has also been described as a friend of former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, who succeeded him as the boss of state-owned oil giant Rosneft in 2013.
Khudainatov’s oil business has acquired significant stakes in companies involved in the energy sector, together with their extraction licences, from Rosneft, according to the EU sanctions listing. And Rosneft has paid $9.6bn to Khudainatov in exchange for a company that owns an oilfield in Taymyr, in Siberia, it said. His business has grown rapidly.
While US authorities admitted that Khudainatov was “wealthy” they claimed that “there is no reason to believe he 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,” according to court filings.
Until last week, Khudainatov had not been placed under sanctions in any jurisdiction. On Friday, however, the European Union added him to its blacklist. It cited the benefits he gained from running a sizeable Russian oil company, but did not mention his connection to the yachts.
The EU’s restrictions against the Kazakhstani businessman have yet to be mirrored by the UK and US.
“Russia’s elites, up to and including President Putin, rely on complex support networks to hide, move and maintain their wealth and luxury assets,” Brian Nelson, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury Department, said last week. “We will continue to enforce our sanctions and expose the corrupt systems by which President Putin and his elites enrich themselves,” he added.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Amadea’s corporate owner, Millemarin Investments, said the company was established in June 2021, just a month before it was recorded as the new owner of the vessel. Millemarin, in turn, is owned by another BVI registered firm, Invest International Finance, which counts a Swiss entity, Boltenko Trust, as its sole shareholder. The trust was run by Olga Boltenko, an international tax and wealth advisor who is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and has worked for top British law firms including Hogan Lovells and Withers.
Boltenko said in a statement released on Tuesday that she and her firm had resigned and were no longer acting for the September Trust or Millemarin Investments.
But last month when she was still acting for Khudainatov Boltenko said in court documents that her firm was the trustee of the September Trust, an irrevocable, discretionary trust established in December 2019 under English law, whose settlor (the individual whose assest were placed in the trust) is Khudainatov. In her evidence, she did not name the beneficiary of the trust. However, she stated that to the best of her knowledge, Kerimov “has never held any interest in any of the companies and/or trust identified”.
The US justice department contends the Amadea has belonged to Kerimov since the autumn of 2021, transferred, it claimed, in a “backdoor Russian deal”. It cited as evidence interviews of crew members and yacht industry employees conducted by an FBI agent.
Crew members said “measures were taken to ensure privacy” for the yacht’s guests, according the the filing. Each member of the family had been given codenames: Kerimov was G-0, his wife G-1. The crew were shown photos of Kerimov and his family, and claimed they had been holidaying on board as recently as February 2022, in St Barts and St Maarten in the Caribbean. They said during a four-month tour this year, the family had been the “only guests onboard”.
Kerimov and Khudainatov could not be reached to comment.
Investigations over the Amadea’s ultimate owner is now in the hands of the US authorities. As is the fate of one of the world’s most expensive pleasure crafts.
