..
Good morning welcome back to the channel and welcome to La Ciotat,
this is a small town in the south of France about 30 miles away from Marseille and fundamentally
it built up around this shipyard here and this shipyard's. Been here for a couple hundred years
and it's become one of the most popular um refit yards for super yachts in in Europe it's one of
the one of the most popular amongst superyacht owners as you can see here so this is a m/y Rising
Sun - this is a massive 135 meter yacht and just behind it you can't really see it from the
s... but just behind it there is motion Amore Vero so m/y Amore Vero is an 85 meter about 280 foot
super yacht and it was built by Oceanco aprox. in 2013 and it's called the "Amore Vero" now
but it was originally called "Princess Olga" and it was named after the wife of the then wife of
a Russian businessman who is the head of Rosneft which is a Russian state-owned energy company
and this was his second wife he named obviously the boat was named after his wife "Princess Olga"
and then in 2018 the name changed to Amore Vero which is what it is now
Igor Sechin is connected to Vladimir Putin of course and he is considered to be the right
hand man of Vladimir Putin so this was his yacht obviously Igor Sechin's people deny that it is his
and they say that the vessel was sold in 2018 but according to the French authorities he still owns
the the company that owns this vessel is still under his control therefore by default he owns it
what's interesting is according to press reports is that he divorced his ex-wife after she had
an affair with a with an Italian racing driver and it seems odd that he would change the name
of the vessel to Amore Vero which is Italian obviously for true love it seems a little
bit strange that he might change the name to that of the vessel after he divorces his wife
and demolished her house as well by the way but it seems odd that he would change the name to that
in actual fact i spoke to a couple of ex-crew members who say that the vessel as far as they
know the vessel was sold in 2018 um but they couldn't tell me who who the new owner was
so this this vessel was one of the first vessels to be arrested at the beginning of the when the
sanctions came in, it was trying to leave here it was in here for refit work and it was hardly
trying to leave here before completion of that work uh and on the second of march he tried to
leave and it was denied permission to leave by the french authorities and the vessel's been here ever
since the economy minister Bruno Lemer said that France had officially seized Amore Vero and
measured that according to the french authorities entrust the state with custody of the yacht
while leaving the costs to the owner so the use of the word seizure here is not the proper definition
of the word seizure when a vessel is seized it's effectively taken over like we've seen with Amadea
in Fiji the vessel assuming that is eventually successful the vessel will become the property
of the U.S. government the French are saying that the vessel has been seized here but the the costs
of ownership remain with the owner so it's not been seized as it it's been detained there will
have been a warrant of arrest for for the vessel to stay here but that brings me on to the next
subject who pays the bills if you had a boat and the authorities have held it here for months
with the potential of never getting it back are you going to pay the bills for mooring and for
the refit work knowing that you might never get it then you have to consider that that's assuming
he can pay the bills whoever the owner is he or she can pay the bills if they're on the sanctions
list their assets have been frozen right so most likely the bank accounts they use to pay the bills
they can't move that money also the shipyard cannot accept money from anybody who's been
sanctioned so even if the owner wanted to pay the bills for his yacht that he doesn't have access to
he can't pay the shipyard because his assets are frozen and even if that isn't the case even if he
can muster up some Rubles or or some Bitcoin or whatever the shipyard can't accept those payments
because they're not allowed to under the rules of the sanctions so that means that this vessel
is sat here and nobody's paying the bills now that brings me on to the crew are the crew being paid
why would you stay on a boat that you're not getting any pay you know if this has been here
since the second of March it's now may so that potentially the crew haven't been paid now that's
just a guess but based on everything else and what we know about the sanctions it's most likely
that the crew haven't been paid also for that a length of time so it's an interesting dilemma here
for the crew i mean do you stay on the boat the pro the promise of eventually getting paid
is probably there but how they can do that i don't know the vessel could be taken in a proper
seizure and sold and the money given to Ukraine or whatever like like what the US is planning
to do with Amadea but in a Reuters newspaper article they said the authorities have informed
third parties about the status of the vessel which does not allow according to 2 companies
involved in maintenance to know who is responsible for its maintenance so the companies that maintain
the vessel because obviously these vessels need constant maintenance and they're trying to get
in touch with the same well who do we contact about being able to maintain the vessel and the
government won't or cannot say the shipyard said in that article the shipyard said we can tell you
we continue to bill when asked who pays the bills replied we don't know so they're sending bills to
the boat and the boat obviously can't fulfil those bills now ordinarily the boat would be
arrested by the shipyard and the money would be taken from the owner eventually or other assets
would be seized but obviously in this case it's already been seized by the government
so it says it says in this article that in France and Spain the cost of maintaining a frozen
or seized yacht remain the responsibility of the owner it's it's an interesting situation
it's a mess really isn't it i mean you know that a lot of people who watch these videos they're not
interested in the welfare of the crew because they say well whether they're working for these people
like i said currently we don't actually know who owns the boat the French authorities should know
by now it's been here long enough and they've they've saw reason to keep it here so that would
suggest that they still believe it is owned by Mr Sechin .all right i'm gonna wrap up here - let me
know what you think -if you work on the boat or if you did work on the boat and you've left since
it happened please get in touch be interested in to know what's going on
if you've got any information about this or other
yachts please get in touch through normal means through the about page of the youtube channel
or via Facebook Messenger- alright guys thanks very much for watching and i'll catch up with you
soon bye-bye -(A quick disclaimer for any lawyers watching at no point did the drone cross over the
boundaries of the shipyard as you can see from the footage here the drone is outside the shipyard and
i use a powerful zoom in to make it look like i'm close but at no point did i go inside).