Sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s megayacht has been seized by German authorities, it has been reported.
The 512-foot yacht Dilbar, described as the oligarch’s prized possession, was stopped in the northern city of Hamburg on Monday.
The yatch is reputed to be one of the biggest in the world.
It was seized in the ongoing war of attrition by Western powers and the United States amid crackdown on oligarchs purported to be aligned with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
Picture of the 500ft-long £600m megayacht
Usmanov was on a list of billionaires to face sanctions from the European Union in response to Russia’s 24 February invasion of Ukraine. It came as the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said it had seized a yacht linked to Rosneft boss Igor Sechin in the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat.
The finance ministry said the yacht was owned by an entity of which Sechin had been identified as the main shareholder.
The US has said it will take strict action to seize property of sanctioned Russians.
“This coming week, we will launch a multilateral transatlantic taskforce 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,” the White House said in a tweet on Sunday.
Washington imposed sanctions on Deripaska and other influential Russians in 2018 because of their ties to president Vladimir Putin after alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which Moscow denies.
