At least 5 superyachts owned by Russian billionaires had been anchored or cruising on Wednesday in Maldives, an Indian Ocean island nation that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, ship monitoring knowledge confirmed.
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The vessels’ arrival within the archipelago off the coast of Sri Lanka follows the imposition of extreme Western sanctions on Russia in reprisal for its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
The Clio superyacht, owned by Oleg Deripaska, the founding father of aluminum large Rusal, who was sanctioned by the United States in 2018, anchored off the capial Male on Wednesday, in line with transport database MarineTraffic. The Titan, owned by Alexander Abramov, a co-founder of metal producer Evraz, arrived on Feb. 28.
Three additional yachts owned by Russian billionaires had been seen cruising in Maldives waters on Wednesday, the info confirmed. They embrace the 88-metre (288 ft) Nirvana owned by Russia’s richest man, Vladimir Potanin. Most vessels had been final seen anchored in Middle Eastern ports earlier within the yr.
A spokesperson for Maldives’ authorities didn’t reply to a request for remark.
The United States has mentioned it’s going to take strict motion to grab property of sanctioned Russians. “This coming week, we’ll launch a multilateral Transatlantic process drive to determine, search out, and freeze the belongings of sanctioned Russian firms and oligarchs – their yachts, their mansions, and another ill-gotten positive aspects that we will discover and freeze below the legislation,” the White House mentioned in a tweet on Sunday.
Washington imposed sanctions on Deripaska and different influential Russians in 2018 due to their ties to President Vladimir Putin after alleged Russian interference within the 2016 US election, which Moscow denies.
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
