A yacht docked in Italy that is under investigation for ties to sanctioned Russians belongs to Vladimir Putin, activists working with the jailed dissident Alexei Navalny claim.
The Italian police have yet to declare who the real owner of the 140m Scheherazade is. Yesterday, however, Navalny’s team of researchers reported that nearly half the Russian crew members it had traced were employed by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSO, which handles security for high-ranking officials including Putin.
This, they said, proved that the Scheherazade belonged to the Russian leader. The information was not very well concealed, the team claimed, since some of the crew were listed as FSO employees in acquaintances’ phone contact lists.
The vessel is docked at Marina di Carrara in Tuscany and has been undergoing dry dock repairs, possibly explaining why it has not fled from investigators as other oligarchs’ yachts based in Europe have.
It was built in Germany in 2020, valued at $700 million, and has a swimming pool with a retractable cover that doubles as a dance floor, a gym and a spa, gold-plated taps and two helicopter pads. In the last two summers it has sailed to Sochi, the Russian Black Sea resort that is the site of Putin’s summer residence, Bocharov Ruchey, where he has spent a large amount of time, including during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Advertisement
In the report, Navalny’s team claimed that the ship’s chief officer, Sergey Grishin, was listed in a contact list as “Sergey G FSO” and leaked databases revealed that Anatoly Furtel, the bosun, was registered at an address in Sochi used by the FSO unit providing protection at Bocharov Ruchey. Records also linked Furtel’s assistant, Alexander Pechurkin, to the FSO unit, the researchers claimed. Overall, almost half the 23 crew members traced were said to be involved with the FSO.
Ownership of the yacht, which is masked by a series of offshore companies, might be traced back to an associate of Putin’s, “but what really matters is that the real owner of the Scheherazade is guarded by the FSO”, the team wrote.
The Italian tax police are known to be investigating the ownership of the yacht and this month The New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies suspected that it may belong to Putin. Its British captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce, has denied the suspicions and said that Putin had never boarded the vessel.
Italy has worked hard to seize the yachts and villas of sanctioned oligarchs who have long bought up homes and moored their vessels in the country’s smartest resorts. On March 4 the police impounded the Lady M, a 65m yacht worth €65 million belonging to Alexey Mordashov, a steel magnate thought to be Russia’s richest man.
In Sanremo the police pounced on Lena, the yacht owned by Gennady Timchenko, an oil exporter and Putin associate. The biggest catch was Sailing Yacht A, a €530 million vessel designed by Philippe Starck and owned by the coal magnate Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko.
Advertisement
In Sardinia the authorities seized a €17 million villa belonging to the Uzbek-born mining magnate Alisher Usmanov. Another of Usmanov’s six Sardinian villas hosted a Sting concert in honour of Putin’s sister in 2016 and the billionaire businessman has been granted honorary citizenship by the local mayor.
Alexey Paramonov, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s European department, lashed out at Italy on Saturday, accusing it of falling victim to “anti-Russian hysteria” and forgetting its close ties to Russia “in a second”. He recalled that Russia had dispatched military doctors to Italy in 2020 to help it to fight its Covid crisis, a mission that critics called a thinly veiled espionage mission.
Paramonov warned that Italy risked “irreversible consequences” if it stepped up sanctions against Russia.
His comments drew a sharp response from Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, who said that the “comparison between the invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic crisis in Italy” was “particularly odious and unacceptable”.
