The luxury yacht “Dilbar”, which was detained due to EU sanctions, left the port of Hamburg early Wednesday morning. The yacht will be moved to Bremen by the shipyard, said a spokeswoman for the main customs office in Hamburg. This would not violate any sanctions provisions. “The relocation of the yacht is monitored by the authorities.” Previously, several media had reported about it.
The luxury yacht was detained in April on the basis of EU sanctions over the invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine. The allegedly most expensive luxury yacht in the world at more than 500 million euros was subject to a ban on disposal and may therefore “no longer be sold, rented or encumbered”, as a spokesman for the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) said at the time. The owner is the sister of the Kremlin-loyal oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
The “Dilbar” was pulled out of the dry dock at the Blohm Voss shipyard by tugboats on Wednesday night. According to NDR, she is said to be on the road as a “dead ship”, i.e. without her own propulsion and without a crew steering the ship. The NDR wrote about the reasons for the transfer that the yacht had blocked the dock. The Lürssen Group, to which Blohm Voss also belongs, has its headquarters in Bremen.
According to investigations by the Federal Criminal Police Office, the 115-meter-long “Luna” can also be assigned to Farkhad Akhmedov, a close friend of Putin – and he is on the EU sanctions list. This yacht is also still in Hamburg. The ship, which has all kinds of leisure facilities, two helicopter landing pads and nine luxury suites and is estimated at around 500 million euros, has not been worked on on the Elbe for a long time. In May it was “frozen”, which is a de facto disposition. “A frozen item may no longer be sold, rented or encumbered,” according to the BKA. For the EU, owner Akhmedov, 66, is “a leading businessman engaged in economic sectors that are a vital resource for the government of the Russian Federation”.
