A luxury yacht worth $200 million owned by oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, will soon be sold at auction after being seized in Croatia earlier this year.
The Ukrainian government announced that a Croatian court has decided that the oligarch’s yacht Royal Romance, measuring a modest 92.5 meters, should be ‘transferred’ to the Ukrainian Agency for Asset Recovery and Management (Arma), which stated that it will ‘preserve the economic value of the yacht by selling it at auction’.
This would be the first such sale on behalf of the Ukrainian people since Western governments imposed sanctions on the assets of hundreds of oligarchs following the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reported The Guardian.
Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician, was arrested in Ukraine in April and extradited to Russia in a prisoner exchange in September. He is often referred to as the ‘dark prince’ of Ukrainian politics, and Putin is the godfather of his daughter Daria.
Arma, a special branch of the Ukrainian government responsible for ‘finding, tracking, and managing assets acquired through corruption’, stated that its agents flew to Croatia and ‘inspected the seized yacht belonging to family members of a member of parliament and one of the leaders of a political force banned in Ukraine’.
