Sun, sea and sanctions: what’s life like on a Russian superyacht?

Lucy didn’t know much about her boss because on paper, he had nothing to do with the yachts at all. They were technically owned by a shell company with nominee directors, registered offshore. This is the case with almost all superyachts, according to Benjamin Maltby, marine lawyer at Keystone Law. These boats are ultra-private by design, their owners nothing more than a dockside rumour. But that hasn’t stopped the world taking a recent renewed interest in who owns the world’s most obscene floating gin palaces.

Last month the UK, EU and US sanctioned hundreds of oligarchs and individuals linked to President Putin. One of the most theatrical assets being frozen are their superyachts. Up to 10% of the world’s 10,000 superyachts — often defined as boats longer than 24 metres — are Russian-owned.

So far, at least eight yachts have been seized by authorities, including Lady M, owned by Alexei Mordashov, a steel billionaire and Russia’s richest man. Sailing Yacht A, owned by coal billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, was seized in Italy. At 470ft, it is longer than 13 London buses, taller than Big Ben and valued at £470 million.

Guy Bennett-Pearce, the British captain of £500 million superyacht Scheherazade, was recently questioned as to whether the yacht in which he works is owned by President Putin. The boat has two helipads, a swimming pool-cum-dancefloor and a mechanical piano with keys that play themselves (“Vladimir Putin is a Fine Fellow” on repeat, allegedly). Bennett-Pearce could not comment.

Other ships are making a convenient escape. “Many disappeared [from Europe and the Caribbean] before the invasion of Ukraine,” says Maltby. Sea Rhapsody, linked to Andrei Kostin, president of state-owned bank VTB, left Turkey for the Seychelles. The Graceful, one of the boats reportedly owned by Putin, left Germany on February 8 to Russia.

But in the short-term it isn’t the oligarchs — when they can be tracked down — who are suffering the consequences. It is the crew of these vehicles — Sailing Yacht A alone has 54. A job, and lifestyle, that promised glamour and travel and good pay — and delivered — is under threat. Workers who only had suspicions about who they were working for are being accused of being collaborators. Is the luxury superyacht lifestyle sunk — and is it good riddance?

Two years ago I was sent to the Monaco Yacht Show for a report for this newspaper. It is where shipyards show off brand new designs, as well as a floating showroom for second hand yachts for sale. Soon after arriving I realised there is nothing more pathetic than seeing hundreds of superyachts parked next to one another. All majesty they have when they are blasting across the ocean is lost, and they just look like a stack of white plastic fridges.

Inside, they are so clean and polished it is as if no one has ever existed on them. There are no signs of life, no wine stains on the carpet from wild nights or children’s toys wedged under sofas. It is sad. The punters are sad, too, largely unimpressed by the endless gold taps, Swarovski-crystalled anchors, chandeliers and glass-sided swimming pools. “Babe, do you like this style,” I heard a leggy brunette, bored out of her brains, ask her husband, as they wandered past yet another mega-yacht.

Azzam yacht docked in Cassablanca

ANDREWGINNS/GETTY IMAGES

Men in sunglasses took hushed phone calls on the back of boats, lounging on sofas as if they already owned the thing. Women in stilettos walked across the decks, scratching the expensive teak as they went, the crew cringing, knowing the damage. On the jetties around the marina, people would stop dead in front of me, stunned that I hadn’t moved out their way.

One morning, I had a tour around Khalila (49 metres, £24 million), said to be owned by a Russian oil baron. It was entirely gold on the outside, with a cartoon theme on the inside. There was a ginormous octopus light fitting across the ceiling of the living room, pink and cream leather beds, gold-tiled showers and a mural in the master suite which, from a distance, looked like a cherry blossom tree. Up close, it was made up of naked anime women having sex with each other.

But this is the world in which thousands of young people, including many Britons, have found gainful employment. It’s the ski chalet girl or boy — but supercharged.

Crew are paid well, with a £2,000-£4,000 monthly starting salary typical, but the days are long, sometimes 18 hours, and the demands are extreme. The staff exist to say yes to the owners’ every whim. Now some crew are are wondering where their next pay cheque is coming from.

“Crew don’t have a voice,” says Karine Rayson, who used to work on superyachts before founding the website Crew Coach. She knows someone who works on a Russian-owned boat hasn’t been paid for nearly a month.

Rayson wanted to leave South Africa, where she was raised, and afford to be able to travel. She was outdoorsy, adventurous and a hard worker, so working on yachts felt like the perfect option. She flew to the south of France, and signed up with a recruiter, sending them her CV — and a photo, as requested.

Some find jobs by walking up and down docks at big ports like Antibes in the south of France, handing their CVs to boats in case they have a vacancy. Other times jobs are advertised by word of mouth.

It is difficult to get the first job as “green crew”, when there is little else on your CV, but Rayson managed to get a job as a stewardess, generally women who work inside the boat, cleaning rooms and serving food and drinks. The other departments on the boat are split up into the deck hands, who look after the outside of the boat, the chefs, the captain and the engineers, who look after the engine.

“You’re so desperate to get a job when you’re new, you’ll put up with anything,” says Rayson. The captain insisted that each hostess go into his bedroom, alone and one-by-one, to be paid each month in cash. “Next time, wear a shorter skirt,” he said once.

It is a small world. Crew fear being known as “difficult”, or for hopping around too many times in a season (it is generally summer in the Med, winter in the Caribbean). As a result, people often feel stuck on “bad” boats, wanting to tough it out.

Rayson worked as interior crew for years and has spent thousands of thankless hours polishing bannisters and smiling sweetly. “You clean with an earbud and a toothpick,” she says. “You polish inside the taps, inside the drain, everything must shine. You vacuum the same space you vacuumed half an hour before, you go mad.”

One stewardess tells me about a “Mrs”, the nickname for the wife of the owner, who demanded 10,000 white roses for dinner that night. They had to fly the flowers by helicopter to the remote Caribbean bay where they were moored. The following day, the Mrs wanted them gone, so, with nowhere else to dump them, the crew had to stash them in their tiny quarters below deck.

A waterfall cascades into the infinity pool on Galactica Supernova

CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Another stewardess tells me about her first job as a 25-year-old, working on a yacht over the Cannes Film Festival. “I took a tray of canapes up to the sky lounge, where the owner wanted drinks, and he was sitting there surrounded by women in high heels and nothing else.”

Sometimes owners specify how they like their hostesses to look. It is a status symbol for them to be matching. “There are certain boats which say, she must fit this build, she must have brown hair, she must be Hispanic,” says one crew member, Alannah. “When it comes to uniform you’re handed a size six skort and if you don’t fit into it, you better by the time the season starts. The boats that are hung up on being beautiful and being seen in beautiful places, do they hire beautiful women? Of course.”

It has always been a precarious profession. Contracts often have a “for any reason” clause, which makes it easy to fire crew with immediate effect, undermining the existence of a contract in the first place. The Maritime Labour Convention, which maintains the employment rights of crew and ensures a safe working environment, applies to staff working on commercial and charter boats. Private yachts do not have to comply and as a result, there is little protection. And now, one London-based underwriter tells me, insurance companies are cancelling their cover of Russian superyachts with immediate effect. As a result, there are potentially hundreds of massive boats moving through the oceans uninsured.

When a boat is seized, it is not owned by the port state, but frozen from being used by the Russian owner. Crew wages are frozen under the same sanctions. Nautilus, the trade union for seafarers, explains: “Under the sanctions, the crew should not be providing a ‘service’ to the owner. Additionally, SWIFT payments have been switched off to seven large Russian banks, so funds cannot be transferred into or out of Russia, therefore the owners may not be able to make the payments for the crew’s salaries.”

“We will start to see instances fairly soon where crew aren’t paid and they walk off,” says Maltby. Erica Lay, a superyacht crew recruiter based in Mallorca, is helping a number of crew who were working on seized Russian vessels, all immediately dismissed. “These people have all signed very strict NDAs,” she says. “They have to be very careful here.”

It was at the Monaco Yacht Show, in 2010, that William Black disappeared, a Guildford boy, 28 at the time. He had been working on the £15m superyacht, Burrasca. That night he was driving a Rib when it collided with a larger boat. He was knocked off and couldn’t be found. By the time Judith, his mother, arrived in Monaco, days later, Burrasca had gone.

“The captain said they’d left his bags with the police and put flowers overboard for him,” says Judith. It came to light that the crew were not insured by the owner, so they could not pay for a submarine to search for his body.

“We know the owner was Russian,” she says, “but that is it. To this day we don’t know who owns it, no one will tell us. It is horrendous, absolutely horrendous.” William was never found.

“For me, as his mother, I just wanted the owner to say I’m sorry,” continues Judith. “But they cut the rope and went, like he never existed, and that is what I found the hardest. They thought of William as expendable.”

Many of the crew I speak to are embarrassed about being linked to Russian owners, but angry for being blamed for taking their money. Crew cannot even prove who their boss actually is, let alone challenge their source of wealth.

“These are the richest people in the world and they hold immense power,” says crew coach Karine Rayson. “You cannot get to them.”