The owner of Putin’s yacht finally lost the lawsuit regarding another yacht in the US

Russian businessman Eduard Khudainatov has finally lost a US court case over a yacht he claimed ownership of.

Former Rosneft chief Khudainatov has finally lost a US court case trying to prove ownership of the yacht Amadea, “Radio Liberty” reports.

The nominal owner of Putin’s yacht Scheherazade and Suleiman Kerimov’s yacht Amadea has tried to prove his ownership of the second vessel in court.

During the trial, he revealed the address of his Moscow registration – it turned out to be a departmental building, which is likely linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

On March 18, a federal court in New York put an end to the legal dispute surrounding the Amadea superyacht, which was seized in Fiji in 2022 and has been in the US for the past three years. The court approved the Justice Department’s decision to sell it at auction.

According to documents, Amadea belongs to a company associated with former Rosneft top manager Eduard Khudainatov. The American authorities believed that Khudainatov was only the nominal owner of the yacht, but in fact it was controlled by billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned in 2018. Khudainatov is also registered with the yacht Scheherazade, which, as investigative journalists previously found out, actually belongs to Vladimir Putin. Currently, Scheherazade is also arrested and is in the port of the Italian city of Marina di Carrara. The KleptoCapture task force played a key role in the arrest of Amadea, an interagency unit under the auspices of the US Department of Justice, which specialized in identifying and seizing Russian assets and stopping the circumvention of sanctions. The money from the sale of the yacht was planned to be transferred to Ukraine. KleptoCapture was dissolved on February 7 by the new US Attorney General, Pamela Bondi.

The previous US government wanted to get rid of the Amadea, which was docked in San Diego, not least because it cost the United States $7 million a year to maintain and maintain.

The Scheherazade, which is nominally owned by Khudainatov, costs even more, but the Italian authorities made an exception for it, allowing not only maintenance but also modernization of the yacht.

Eduard Khudainatov’s lawyers argued that he, not Kerimov, was the real owner of the yacht.

In court documents, the US authorities did not deny Khudainatov’s connection to the yacht, but, citing evidence collected by the FBI, argued that he was only a nominal owner to hide the fact that Kerimov was the real owner of the yacht.

Khudainatov, a former top executive at Rosneft, has long been closely associated with the company’s CEO, Igor Sechin, a former intelligence officer who is considered a close confidant of Putin. Sechin has been sanctioned by the European Union but not the United States. In 2023, Forbes estimated Khudainatov’s fortune at at least $2 billion, attributing his wealth to “longstanding relationships with Putin and Sechin.”

Evidence added to FBI testimony in the Fiji trial showed that “Amadea” was managed by Imperial Yachts, a Monaco-based company that was sanctioned in 2024.

The company “provides yacht-related services to the Russian elite, including individuals close to President Putin,” the U.S. Treasury Department said. Imperial Yachts’ Russian CEO, Yevgenii Kochman, was also sanctioned.

It was Imperial Yachts that was engaged in the construction of the 140-meter “Scheherazade” worth $ 700 million.

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Earlier, USM reported that US citizens pay $ 600 thousand per month for the maintenance of the superyacht “Amadea”. As of the end of 2024, these expenses have already reached $ 30 million.

Recall that in April 2023, the Fijian police detained the yacht Amadea and its crew. In May, the Supreme Court of Fiji granted a motion to arrest the yacht.

In October 2023, the New York prosecutor’s office filed a lawsuit to confiscate the 106-meter superyacht “Amadea” worth over $ 300 million.