A €600,000 (£508,000) luxury car built to withstand bullets and explosives has been seized in Sardinia as part of EU sanctions against oligarchs with close links to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
The black Mercedes-Maybach S650 Guard belongs to Alisher Usmanov, a former shareholder in Arsenal football club, and was recently seized by police in Porto Cervo on the Costa Smeralda, the Corriere della Sera reported on Tuesday.
Corriere speculated that the armoured vehicle may have been used to transport Putin during “secret visits” to Sardinia, a popular destination for Russian oligarchs, especially the Porto Cervo area.
Usmanov is an honorary citizen of Arzachena, the administrative hub of Porto Cervo, where the “maximum protection” car was bought in 2018, according to Corriere.
The mayor of Arzachena, Roberto Ragnedda, told the Italian press in early March that Usmanov regularly hosted “heads of state, businessmen and personalities who played fundamental roles in the economy, culture, politics and property at a world level”.
Usmanov is also reported to have donated €500,000 to Sardinia’s regional authorities to help fight Covid-19.
The local newspaper, L’Unione Sarda, reported that other assets owned by him had also been seized on the island, including a property complex worth €17m in the Gulf of Pevero and six corporate cars.
Usmanov, once said to be the UK’s richest person, last week claimed that millions of pounds of his assets were in an irrevocable trust.
Other properties owned by oligarchs confiscated in Sardinia include properties worth €4m linked to Petr Aven, who until recently headed Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank, and a property complex in Portisco, in the municipality of Olbia, owned by the billionaire businessman Alexei Mordashov.
Italian police seized a yacht owned by Mordashov, the richest man in Russia before being blacklisted by the EU, and another owned by Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire with close ties to Putin, in the Ligurian port of Imperia.
