new efforts by u.s law enforcement to
make russian oligarchs feel the pain of
putin's war friday italian authorities
in the port of trieste seized the ship
known as sailing worth about 578 million
belonging to andre melichenko we're
joining with european allies to find and
seize their yachts their luxury
apartments their private jets
we're coming for you ill-begotten gain i
use uh open source techniques to track
russian oligarchs of vessels i think i
have 25 just of the main ones the ones
with the biggest yaks but there are so
many for decades these oligarchs have
sheltered their extraordinary and in
some cases stolen wealth outside of
russia in secret accounts and by
acquiring vast amounts of real estate
and other assets like yachts and private
jets i've been trying to help getting
the pressure up and moving the public
towards pressuring the governments to
act
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i do ozynt which stands for open source
investigations and in this specific case
and period i'm trying to attract the
russian oligarchs the action vessels and
votes it's
hard for me not to feel strongly about
what's happening in ukraine ukrainian
officials say russian forces bombed a
theater used as a shelter in mario paul
intentionally targeting civilians is a
war crime after all the destruction of
the past three weeks
i find it difficult to conclude the
russians are doing otherwise
i've always been actually sort of a fan
of russia i love their culture
unfortunately i also hate what the putin
regime has been doing to it and
obviously seeing this
absurd war it's
hard to stand still and do nothing so
i've been attempting to focus my skills
into what i thought it would be
at least at some level impactful
some of these yachts can take millions
of dollars a month just to maintain and
they have to be maintained to preserve
their value the boats are enormous
amounts of money as opposed to stocks
they are hard to crash their value is
not going to be go down all the shoulder
with the as the stocks of their company
the bank account can be frozen neville
in differential gear can be frozen but a
york can be stored in a safe harbor if i
have an 800 million dollars boat in
dubai i know that even in worst
worst-case scenario i can get 400
million dollars cash so it's a rather
important
mean of preserving their fortune putin
is thought to be one of the richest men
in the world but proof is hard to find
on paper while the kremlin claims he
makes around a hundred and forty
thousand dollars a year experts believe
he's worth billions and say that his
real wealth is hidden in the accounts
and assets of his oligarchs i have been
tracking putin's uh yacht since 2016.
this is what the graceful looks like
inside there's a pool that can be
converted into a dance floor an elevator
that's putin's stateroom with a huge
king-sized bed
it usually stays in the black sea during
the summer and it used to travel back to
the mediterranean seat for maintenance
either in barcelona or malta this year
instead it headed to hamburg in
september and while there was all this
discussion about the crisis we continue
to see signs of russian escalation
including new forces arriving at the
ukrainian border
as we've said before
we are in the window when an invasion
could begin at any time should vladimir
putin decide to order it something
strange that happened is putin was
brought out in a hurry and it failed
rapidly towards the closest russian
waters which were in kaliningram it's
the last case where you want to go with
a luxurious lesson running to
kaliningrad was according to me very
significantly it meant that putin knew
that action probably been taken against
this vessel it all centers on the
collapse of the soviet union a small
group of shrewd businessmen rushed in to
take advantage of the privatization of
massive state companies researchers
estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign
wealth of rich russians amounted to
around 85 percent of russia's gdp
vladimir putin the way he has
farmed out his money is he holds it
through different oligarchs oligarchs
are very important because
if they turn against putin putin is in
trouble he needs them and he needs them
to be happy since 2005
42 private vessels over 100 meters were
built of these 40 to 14 were of russian
oligarchs minichenko is probably though
one of the biggest success stories in
this list the italian authorities in the
port of trieste seized the ship known as
sailing yachty he went public in the day
after harding against the war in ukraine
so surely these sanctions have some
effect
they use open source techniques to track
russian oligarchs vessels each vessel
especially those over a certain size
needs to have something that's akin to a
transponder it sends a small amount of
data about
its name its heading location and
movements
this data is completely free to
intercept and radio stations on the
ground will collect this data and use it
to avoid collisions
one of the best sources of data
for vessels it's a website called
marinetraffic.com there is a fleetmon
website plus the more democratic aspects
of the tracking which it means ownership
data registration data etc equals dot
org
i also developed some custom tools which
allow me to track multiple vessels at
the same time i've been interested in
subject probably i started collecting
data in 2016 basically
referencing the data between various
articles checking
and verifying data with some databases
of vessel ownership
and i was slowly able to grow a list of
oligarchs and yachts
i'm putting that all together with
graphics and something that would be
easy to consume by the public and would
be shareable on social media and hope
detailed uh getting the attention of the
public and getting the public to put
some kind of pressure on the government
looking at the general economics of the
world you can see that russia is not a
particularly rich country it is not a
developed economy but
absolutely almost one third
of the biggest judge in the world belong
to the ruling class russia's
billionaires control roughly 30 of the
wealth within russia it's quite telling
of how much the russian population got
robbed by the regime and the government
if you go outside of moscow you can see
extreme poverty and the lack of basic
services their roads are terrible
hospitals that aren't working schools
have no funding etc etc desolation and
decay here but this has become an all
too common site across rural russia more
than 20 million russians are living
below the poverty line and in contrast
to these you see these oligarchs which
own the biggest amount of yachts in the
world which had a fleet of private
planes which is impressive there is a
huge contrast basically between
this ruling class in russia and the
regular russian people