More than 60 police officers raided a luxury yacht in northern Germany linked to a Russian businessman accused of violating sanctions and money laundering, prosecutors in Frankfurt said on Tuesday. This is an “extensive and complex network of companies and corporations”
Investigators in Germany have searched a yacht belonging to a Russian tycoon as part of a money laundering investigation. The vessel is the largest pleasure yacht in the world in terms of weight.
More than 60 police officers raided the luxury yacht in northern Germany linked to the businessman accused of violating sanctions and money laundering, prosecutors in Frankfurt said on Tuesday.
The vessel is 155 meters long, its value is estimated at about 600 million dollars, and it was previously docked at a shipyard in Hamburg since October 2021 for repairs. The ship is now anchored in the northern port city of Bremen.
German authorities identified the suspect only as a 69-year-old Russian businessman. At the time, police raided a lakeside villa in the city listed by Alisher Usmanov, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. They also searched 24 other properties linked to him in the German states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, German broadcaster DW reported.
Prosecutors say they are investigating the transfer of several million euros acquired through illegal activities, including tax evasion. They said that it was an “extensive and complex network of companies and corporations”.
According to the investigators, the raid on the yacht was also carried out at the request of the US Department of Justice, which launched its own investigation. In a statement on Monday, Osmanov’s representatives called the allegations “baseless and defamatory.”
The British newspaper ‘Sunday Times’ ranked Osmanov 6th in the list of the richest people in the world in 2021. He was one of dozens of Russian billionaires hit by Western sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine. While the US confiscated his personal assets, it avoided imposing sanctions on the companies controlled by him, in the field of metals and mining, in order not to raise commodity prices, he currently lives in his native Uzbekistan.