A 459-foot mystery in a Tuscan port: Is it a Russian’s superyacht?

Written Michael Forsythe, Gaia Pianigiani and David D. Kirkpatrick
From Germany’s North Sea ports to the French Riviera, open season has been declared on superyachts. Across Europe, authorities are hunting down luxury vessels tied to Russian oligarchs in the effort to inflict pain on President Vladimir Putin’s allies.
In Marina di Carrara, a small Italian town on the Tuscan coast, one of the world’s biggest, newest and most expensive superyachts — called the Scheherazade — is under scrutiny Italian police. Almost as long as a US guided-missile destroyer, it dominates the waterfront.
The yacht, estimated the website SuperYachtFan to cost about $700 million, has two helicopter decks and is studded with satellite domes. Inside, photos supplied a former crew member show, is a swimming pool with a retractable cover that converts to a dance floor. Then there’s the fully equipped gym and gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms.
In the rarefied world of the biggest superyachts (only 14 that are at least 140 meters, or 459 feet long), the Scheherazade is alone in that no likely owner has been publicly identified. That has spurred speculation that it could be a Middle Eastern billionaire or a superconnected Russian — even Putin.
The ship’s captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce, a British national, denied that Putin owned or had ever been on the yacht. “I have never seen him. I have never met him,” he said. He added, in a phone interview from the yacht, that its owner was not on any sanctions l. He did not rule out that the person could be Russian, but declined to say more about the owner’s identity, citing a “watertight nondisclosure agreement.”

Bennett-Pearce said that Italian investigators had come aboard Friday and examined some of the ship’s certification documents. “They are looking hard. They are looking at every aspect,” he said. “This isn’t the local coppers coming down, these are men in dark suits.” A person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it, confirmed that the Italian financial police had opened an inquiry.

On Monday night, Bennett-Pearce said he had “no choice” but to hand over documents revealing the owner’s identity to Italian authorities. He said he would do so Tuesday and had been told they would be handled with “confidentiality.”
“I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this will clear the vessel of all negative rumors and speculations,” he wrote in a message to a New York Times reporter.
The mystery about the ship’s owner arose because — even for the hyper-confidential world of superyachting — there is an unusual degree of secrecy surrounding the boat. Not only do contractors and crew members sign nondisclosure agreements, as on many superyachts, but the vessel also has a cover to hide its name plate. And when it first arrived at the port, workers erected a tall metallic barrier on the pier to partly obscure the yacht from onlookers. Some locals remarked that they had never seen anything like it for other boats.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden announced a Justice Department task force to go after oligarchs close to Putin and facing sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have been imposed against hundreds of people, and the l keeps growing.
Last week, French authorities seized the yacht Amore Vero near Marseille as it was preparing to depart, claiming it was owned a man on that l: Igor Sechin, the head of the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft. In Italy, police in Sanremo impounded Lena, a yacht belonging to Gennady Timchenko, a Putin friend who controls an oil exporting company. In near Imperia, police also impounded the Lady M, a yacht belonging to Alexei Mordashov, Russia’s richest man. The fate of the Dilbar, one of the world’s biggest yachts that the United States says belongs to oligarch Alisher Usmanov, is unclear. It is in Hamburg, and German officials said the vessel could not leave without an export waiver, Bloomberg News reported.
One trade website, which bills itself as “the global authority in superyachting,” claims that the vessel’s owner is “known to be a Middle Eastern billionaire.” The Scheherazade shares a name with the female storyteller in “The Arabian Nights,” and it made one brief foray into the Red Sea in September 2020, calling at the Egyptian port of Hurghada. But mostly it stays in Marina di Carrara, where it has been moored since last September.
Locals have their own theory about the ship’s ownership. Some have heard people onboard speaking Russian. And Scheherazade is also the title of a symphony Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
“Everybody calls it Putin’s yacht, but nobody knows whose it is,” said Ernesto Rossi, a retired clerk who was taking a walk along the marina’s promenade Friday. “It’s a rumor that’s been going around for months.”
In Italy, the phrase “Putin’s yacht” has become shorthand for a mysterious and ultra-luxurious ship. It’s also a joke among the dozens of crew members, Bennett-Pearce said. “I’ve heard the same rumors.”
Another, smaller vessel, the Graceful, has long been tied to the Russian president and is known as “Putin’s yacht.” It was tracked leaving Germany for the Russian port of Kaliningrad just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. (U.S. government officials point out that Putin owns little outright; many of the luxurious homes or ships he uses are owned oligarchs.)
Putin appears to have a penchant for big pleasure boats. During his time as Russia’s leader, he has been photographed on yachts from Russia’s northern reaches to the Black Sea in the south. Last May, he and Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, took a cruise on a yacht at the Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
About 70% of the Scheherazade’s crew is Russian, Bennett-Pearce said. And during each of the past two summers, it has sailed to Sochi, the last time in early July 2021, according to MarineTraffic, a top maritime analytics provider. The ship’s construction was managed Imperial Yachts, a company in Monaco that, Reuters reported, manages the Amore Vero, Sechin’s seized yacht. Nick Flashman, who oversees construction of large vessels at Imperial Yachts, declined to comment.
One former crew member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nondisclosure agreement, said that shipmates called it “Putin’s yacht.” The person said the ship was manned an international crew during “boss off” times; when it was “boss on,” the crew was replaced an all-Russian staff. In the weeks before the Scheherazade’s 2020 trip to the Black Sea, the foreign crew was dismissed, the person said.

Bennett-Pearce said “categorically there is not a European crew that comes on and a Russian crew that comes on.” Many of the ship’s senior officers are from Britain, New Zealand and Spain. Many international crew members were dismissed in 2020, replaced Russians who didn’t demand the high salaries and benefits that their predecessors had, the captain said. “It came down to economics,” he said.
Given the antipathy that people outside of Russia have toward Putin, if the Russian president really were the owner or principal user of the yacht, keeping non-Russian senior crew members like him on staff would make no sense, Bennett-Pearce said.
“If there’s a European crew onboard it’s the biggest smoke and mirror and the biggest risk I’ve ever heard of,” he said.