More than 30 investigators from the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office searched a suspected oligarch yacht in the port of the Hanseatic city on Wednesday. The investigation is directed “against an entrepreneur from the Russian Federation on suspicion of violating the Foreign Trade Act,” said the Attorney General and the BKA. The Federal Police and experts from the Navy were also involved in the operation.
According to information from the dpa, it is the luxury yacht “Luna”, which the BKA assigns to the Russian businessman Farkhad Akhmedov. The 67-year-old has been on a list of people subject to EU sanctions for the Russian attack on Ukraine for a year. The public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt did not want to comment on the identity of the accused. The 67-year-old is suspected of having violated the obligation to report assets to the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Federal Office of Economics and Export Control after being included in the EU sanctions list. He is said to have not reported “significant assets” to the authorities in Germany. A spokesman for the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office said the search was on the yacht specifically for expensive art or other items of high value.
Navy experts were also involved in the operation in Hamburg. Their special knowledge is required to find possible secret hiding places on board the 115-meter-long luxury yacht, it said. The “Luna” had already been arrested by the authorities in Hamburg in the spring of last year. The yacht is in the shipyard of the Hamburg shipbuilder Blohm+Voss, which belongs to the Lürssen Group. A spokesman did not want to comment “on sanctions and corresponding official measures regarding the ships lying with us”. “Of course we work closely with the responsible authorities and follow all sanctions regulations,” he said simply.