On Wednesday, nearly five Russian billionaire-owned superyachts were anchored or sailing in Maldives, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean that does not have an extradition treaty with the West, according to a ship-tracking data.
The ships’ entry into the island off the coast of Sri Lanka comes after the implementation of critical Western sanctions against Russia in retaliation for its February 24 attack on Ukraine.
According to Forbes reports, Germany had captured Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s humongous yacht on Wednesday in a Hamburg shipyard. Usmanov is among the names on the roster of billionaires to receive sanctions from the European Union on Monday.
The German government has not responded to comment requests, and neither have Usmanov’s representatives.
Shipping database MarineTraffic showed that the Clio mega-yacht owned by Oleg Deripaska, founder of aluminum behemoth Rusal, who faced sanctions from the United States in 2018, was anchored off the capital Male on Wednesday.
Alexander Abramov’s the Titan entered on February 28. Abramov is a co-founder of steel manufacturer Evraz.
According to data, three additional yachts owned by Russian billionaires were spotted navigating Maldives waters on Wednesday. It includes the Nirvana, an 88-meter (288 feet) yacht owned by the richest man in Russia, Vladimir Potanin. Several ships were last spotted anchored in Middle Eastern ports earlier in the year.
The United States stated that it would take serious actions to capture the property of sanctioned Russians.
On Sunday, the White House tweeted: “This coming week, we will launch a multilateral Transatlantic task force to identify, hunt down, and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs—their yachts, their mansions, and any other ill-gotten gains that we can find and freeze under the law.”
In 2018, the United States implemented sanctions against Deripaska and other powerful Russians due to their association with President Vladimir Putin following alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 US election, which Moscow refused to admit.
