Latest news with #Pelorus
Travel Weekly
2 days ago
- Business
- Travel Weekly
Space tourism's slow ascent
The ability to rocket away from Earth may currently be accessible to only the very few, but that may change in the near future. 'Space tourism is currently in its infancy, but progress is steady,' Fu said. 'If technological advancements, regulatory harmonization and infrastructure development continue on pace, we can reasonably project that by the early to mid-2030s, space travel will become accessible to a broader group of participants — especially affluent adventure travelers, researchers, educators and/or artists.' Fu likened the budding industry to the beginnings of aviation, which was initially only an option for the wealthiest. 'By the 2040s, we may begin to see more democratized access through government partnerships, educational sponsorships and reduced commercial costs, much like early aviation transitioned from luxury to mainstream,' she said. Carroll echoed the sentiment, saying that increased frequency and advanced technology will likely drive the cost down in coming years. For example, the Blue Origin rocket's booster, capsule, engine, landing gear and parachutes are all reusable, which the company says not only reduces waste but decreases the cost of its flights. And for those who can't quite afford six- and seven-figure tickets to the stars, there are space-inspired experiences here on Earth. Pelorus developed an astronaut-training program designed to be conducted over four days in Iceland. The itinerary includes both physical and mental training, including underwater exercises. Carroll likened it to 'a lunar landing camp' and said it was developed with input from space agencies and former astronauts. Curran chartered a zero gravity flight in Rochester, N.Y., where he is based. On a zero gravity flight, passengers float as if they were in space. 'You bounce around the cabin and you experience weightlessness,' he said. 'It's a blast.' Some clients have placed deposits with Orbite, Curran said, which is developing virtual reality to experience simulated missions. There's also the National Aerospace Training and Research Center near Philadelphia, which offers spaceflight programs.
Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- Times
The best bespoke yacht trips for children and parents
• This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenue For those families with dreamy budgets, who can travel wherever they fancy on their own or with a chartered superyacht, the British travel company Pelorus ( has a simple answer to the perennial question of 'what should we do with the children this summer?' They ask the children what sorts of experiences and activities they would like to do. Then they start planning magic-filled expeditions that might spark their passions. Last year, for instance, Cecilia, aged seven, said, 'I want to swim with mermaids and rescue turtles.' Turtles were no problem: the planners created an itinerary for the 45-metre sailing yacht Celestia from which she could watch green turtles and manta rays while snorkelling in Komodo. And mermaids? 'We hired a freediver to dress up,' Geordie Mackay-Lewis, the co-founder and chief executive of the company, says. 'The kids spent the afternoon in a glass-bottom kayak and snorkelling with her.' Treasure hunts costing anything from £12,000 to six figures are a stock in trade, in settings from Antigua to Costa Rica, with a novel-worthy narrative and actors in pirate costume. 'We can bury chests on a remote beach or underwater,' Mackay-Lewis says. 'When kids can't dive because they're too young, we use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to go down and unlock the chest, grab a scroll and bring it back up to the surface.' This means parents are off the hook to sip cocktails on the aft deck of the yacht, which works well for everyone. 'Teenagers usually respond well to a guide,' says Rob McCallum, the co-founder of Eyos ( which has led 1,500 expeditions across all five oceans and seven continents. 'The guide is showing them cool things they might not want to be seen to be learning in front of Mum and Dad. But a guide is independent.' Eyos's guides are extravagantly overqualified. 'They'll have their own specialist discipline but will be able to speak with authority on history, geography and climate as well as having all sorts of field skills,' says McCallum, who has led submersible missions to all of the world's 10,000-metre-plus trenches, the Titanic (seven times) and has broken expedition records in the Ross Sea and North West Passage. If tropical climes are a client's scene, he recommends hopping through the Solomon Islands to Papua New Guinea, where children might learn how coconuts are harvested, play with locals — 'kids are a passport to another culture' — snorkel reefs or go bamboo rafting down a freshwater river. In Antarctica, meanwhile, McCallum suggests a wildlife-focused itinerary, starting at Punta Arenas in Chile and then flying two hours to King George Island to meet an expedition yacht to go on to the great white south. To prepare younger children for expeditions off the mothership on Zodiac tenders, they might sketch different species of penguin, so when they do see them on the journey they can identify them — and perhaps teach their parents a few things. Attaching experts to a trip can deepen the experience further. For Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Eyos has used a professor of anthropology and a marine biologist, while for the Antarctic McCallum would recommend a penguin researcher and a PhD-level cetacean specialist. Pelorus's experts have included astronauts for stargazing cruises with space-mad children, BBC photographers for wildlife expeditions and Michelin-starred chefs for foraging adventures. Prices for their time run from £700 to more than £7,000 a day. Whether it's through experts or imaginative approaches, the idea is to take an extraordinary experience and make it transformative. 'Even for kids that are privileged, not many have seen 'a whale being a whale',' McCallum says. 'To spend quality time with one while it's feeding as a family pod …' Well, you might say it's priceless but that's not quite true. Certain yachts lend themselves to family trips more than others. Legend, which costs about €1.5 million for ten days with Eyos, is popular in the Antarctic. At 77.4 metres it can accommodate an extended family of 22 and keep everyone busy between the Swedish spa, cinema, 200-metre-rated submarine and every conceivable water toy and bit of ice-diving equipment. The 126-metre Octopus ($3 million for ten days), originally built for the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has dual helipads, a cinema, glass-bottomed observation lounge, spa, pool and an internal marina with decompression chamber from which to easily deploy its expedition kit. • The most expensive yachts that cost €3 million a week Next year the ultimate family toy will be launched: the 194.9m REV Ocean, whose back half is a cutting-edge research vessel and front half a serious superyacht. During charters through the brokerage house Burgess ( the in-house science team can custom-design projects for families using the expedition specialist Joro Experiences ( As well as a 6,000-metre ROV and a submarine that can go down to 2,300m, there will be a broadcast-quality media room where teens could create a documentary and, quite possibly, hologram tech in the two-deck auditorium, so David Attenborough could be beamed in for an afternoon lecture. Price on application — make that call near a fainting couch.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Abramovich ‘dodged millions in tax by renting out superyachts', reports claim
Roman Abramovich allegedly dodged potentially tens of millions of euros in tax by renting out his superyachts to himself, according to an investigation. From 2005 until 2012, the former Chelsea FC owner is alleged to have registered five luxury yachts as commercial vehicles, thereby avoiding paying VAT on their purchase and running costs. The illusion of a commercial operation was maintained through a pleasure cruise business under which the vessels were leased between companies owned by Abramovich, it has been alleged by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the BBC. Documents reviewed in the investigation showed that the superyachts were owned by companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, all of them owned by a Cyprus-based trust that belonged to Abramovich. It has been reported that, under the scheme, these yacht-owning companies would then rent the vessels long-term to an Abramovich-owned company called Blue Ocean Yacht Management. Blue Ocean would, in turn, lease the boats for cruises to a set of companies also owned by Abramovich. While the scheme was under way, it is claimed that shipping data showed that the yachts were often nowhere near where charter agreements between Blue Ocean and its 'customers' said they would be. Private vessels are subject to purchase taxes and levies on fuel, maintenance and other costs in the EU countries that Abramovich frequented with his fleet. It is alleged that the Blue Ocean set-up allowed Abramovich to claim a tax exemption for a maritime business, as well as avoid levies on goods and services provided to his yachts, such as fuel and maintenance. Superyachts owned via the structure were reported to have included Pelorus (£160 million), Luna (£240 million) and Eclipse – the third-biggest yacht in the world with an estimated value of £563 million. A real commercial superyacht-for-hire business would be expected to show profits. But Blue Ocean's accounts from 2005 to 2012 indicated that its expenses almost matched its income, which also meant that little corporation tax was due as it made little profit. A leaked email sent by Jonathan Holloway, the Blue Ocean director, while the scheme was being set up set out the plan. Mr Holloway wrote: 'We want to avoid paying VAT on the purchase price of the yachts and where possible to avoid paying VAT on goods and services provided to the yachts. 'Our structure must as clearly as possible separate the different parties so that an investigator checking on our operation would see it as a legitimate structure. 'But we all have to recognise that a determined investigator could eventually discover this is an in-house structure with the possible consequences that would entail.' Responding to the BBC investigation, Mr Holloway said that he 'managed literally hundreds of vessels from many different locations around the world'. He said: 'I can't be expected to remember the individual circumstances of every vessel I have ever managed.' He added that he 'used structures others in the industry were using'. Cypriot tax officials were reported to have pursued Blue Ocean over 17 million euros (£11.8 million) in unpaid VAT in 2018, although it is not known if the sum was paid. Blue Ocean was dissolved last summer. Lawyers for Abramovich – who is reported to live a life of luxury in exile after being sanctioned for alleged links to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president – said he 'always obtained independent expert professional tax and legal advice' and 'acted in accordance' with it. They denied that he had knowledge of, or was personally responsible for, any tax evasion. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Abramovich dodged millions in tax with superyachts-for-hire scheme
It was Christmas 2011, a year after Roman Abramovich had taken delivery of his new superyacht, Eclipse. But it seemed the oligarch would not be using it over the festive period - records show it had been chartered by a company based in the British Virgin Islands. And yet photographs from Christmas Day that year show Mr Abramovich in the Caribbean sunshine, standing on the swim platform at the rear of the yacht, with Eclipse's large letter-E logo behind him. Charter records such as this were part of a decade-long scheme to mislead tax authorities, now uncovered in an investigation by the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The scheme falsely presented the Russian oligarch's fleet of yachts as a commercial leasing operation, to dodge millions of euros in VAT on their purchase and running costs. "There has been tax evasion," Italian tax lawyer and professor Tommaso Di Tanno told the BBC. "This is criminal." In a statement, lawyers for Mr Abramovich - who now reportedly divides his time between Istanbul, Tel Aviv and the Russian resort of Sochi - said he had "always obtained independent expert professional tax and legal advice" and "acted in accordance" with it. The billionaire, who was sanctioned by the UK in March 2022 over his connection to Vladimir Putin's regime, bought five luxury yachts over the course of the 2000s that were involved in the tax scheme. Among them was the 115m (377ft) Pelorus, which he reportedly lent to Chelsea footballer John Terry for his honeymoon in 2007 - and Eclipse, which at 162.5m (533ft) was once the largest private yacht in the world and worth an estimated $700m (£559m). The scheme to dodge tax on the yachts - and other secrets of the sanctioned oligarch's corporate empire - is laid bare in over 400,000 files and 72,000 emails leaked from a Cypriot corporate service provider, MeritServus. They show how MeritServus administered the oligarch's businesses through a global network of companies owned by a series of trusts of which Mr Abramovich was the beneficiary. The BBC and its media partners, including the Guardian, have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Cyprus Confidential investigation. We previously revealed Mr Abramovich's financial links to one of Mr Putin's closest associates, accused of holding the president's wealth. The files reveal how Mr Abramovich's advisers helped him avoid paying huge tax bills on the yachts' running costs in EU waters by using companies to hire them out to himself or other companies he controlled. Documents show how the five yachts were leased to a company in Cyprus called Blue Ocean Yacht Management, which chartered them on to a handful of companies in the British Virgin Islands that appeared independent - but which were all in fact controlled by Mr Abramovich. Click here to see the BBC interactive The scheme to dodge VAT in Cyprus was set out in a revealing 2005 memorandum on the proposed "Operating Structure" for the management of Mr Abramovich's yachts. "We want to avoid paying VAT on the purchase price of the yachts and where possible to avoid paying VAT on goods and services provided to the yachts," wrote the memo's author, Jonathan Holloway, then a director of Blue Ocean. You can hear File on 4 Investigates: Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 28 January and at 11:00 on Wednesday 29 January - or on BBC Sounds Although Blue Ocean and the companies hiring the yachts were all owned by Mr Abramovich's trusts, they were intended to appear unconnected "so that an investigator checking on our operation would see it as a legitimate structure", Mr Holloway wrote in the memo he sent to some of Mr Abramovich's closest associates. Mr Holloway warned them they should be "aware of the risks". He wrote: "We all have to recognise that a determined investigator could eventually discover this is an in-house structure with the possible consequences that would entail." Mr Holloway wrote that Blue Ocean, the companies to which it leased the yachts, and the ultimate "customer" should not have the same shareholders, directors or registered addresses, to avoid any "common link" that might arouse suspicion. As the memo noted, Mr Abramovich's lawyer had agreed to put the ownership of Blue Ocean into an entirely separate trust - apparently distancing it from the other companies. Sure enough, ownership of the yacht management company Blue Ocean was subsequently transferred from the oligarch's main trust to a new one, the Neptune Trust. The way Mr Abramovich's companies leased the yachts to each other, Prof Di Tanno told the BBC, was an "artificial structure" that evaded tax - a criminal offence. "My conclusion is that in the case, there has been a tax evasion… because all the parties know exactly what to do in order to hide the reality," he said. Tax expert Rita de la Feria told the BBC she had seen in the yacht scheme "indications" that they "may be misrepresenting information". "If that is the case, then we are now in the realm of evasion," she added. Mr Holloway, who stepped down as a director of Blue Ocean about 15 years ago, told the BBC that he "joined Blue Ocean 20 years ago and was there for a relatively short period of time". He said he had "managed literally hundreds of vessels from many different locations around the world". "I can't be expected to remember the individual circumstances of every vessel I have ever managed," he said, adding that he "used structures others in the industry were using". Lawyers representing Mr Abramovich told the BBC he denied "any allegation that he had any knowledge" or was "personally responsible" or liable for "any alleged deception of any government authority" to evade tax. His lawyers said that just as Mr Abramovich sought professional legal and tax advice and acted on it, he expects that "similar advice was sought at the relevant times by those with responsibility for the day-to-day running" of the companies involved in the scheme. If this were a real superyacht leasing business, substantial profits might be expected. However Blue Ocean's accounts show that from 2005 to 2012, its expenses almost matched its income. This meant almost no corporation tax was due as the company's profits were tiny. A note from the Blue Ocean director suggests the close matching of expenses and income was no accident and the company would generate charters when the scheme needed to cover expenses. "At the beginning of each week we will have a meeting in Blue Ocean where we will look at our current bank balances and our cash needs for the next 1~2 weeks [sic]. If we see a need for a cash injection we will raise an appropriate time charter and invoices," he wrote. There is also evidence in the leaked files that charter agreements were backdated. This includes a time charter agreement supposedly signed in July 2005 by Blue Ocean and another Abramovich company in the BVI called Eyke Services. However, records show Eyke Services did not exist at that point - it was not incorporated until a month later. In another case, a director of Blue Ocean requested the production of a backdated and signed time charter in order to obtain delivery of duty-free fuel for Mr Abramovich's 86m (282ft) yacht Ecstasea - which could accommodate 15 guests in eight suites - saving the billionaire $44,000 (£35,000) in tax. In the documents, tax consultants from Deloitte in Cyprus wrote to Mr Holloway, the Blue Ocean director, saying if the ships were pleasure vessels, they would have to pay VAT. But if the vessels were classified as commercial, they would not. A leading superyacht lawyer Benjamin Maltby told the BBC the type of contracts used for many of Mr Abramovich's luxury yacht charters were actually designed for commercial ships carrying dry cargos such as grain or steel. This gives us more evidence that the whole commercial "look" of the operation was a sham. Mr Abramovich's superyacht scheme came under legal scrutiny twice, with varying levels of success, the BBC and Bureau of Investigative Journalism has learned. Richard Bridge captained two of Mr Abramovich's yachts for almost six years from 2006 to 2012, including the Pelorus, and the giant Eclipse, the pride of Abramovich's fleet. A couple of years after he finished working for Mr Abramovich, the captain was stopped and questioned at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport. Italian prosecutors had started proceedings against three of Mr Abramovich's captains - including Mr Bridge - for unpaid excise duties on refuelling and tax evasion. But Mr Bridge told the BBC he had contacted Blue Ocean and "their lawyers got onto it", telling him a few months later the case had been dropped. Italian court records seen by the BBC show proceedings were halted after the lawyers "produced documentation" proving Pelorus was "entered in the registers as a commercial boat as it is used for commercial purposes or for hire". Mr Bridge said he was unaware Mr Abramovich also controlled the companies that were chartering the yachts. In Cyprus, tax officials were separately investigating Blue Ocean over up to €17m (£14.3m) in unpaid VAT, disputing the company's claim to be "zero-rated" for VAT because it was a commercial operation. Blue Ocean's lawyers said demands to provide evidence the vessels had been used commercially by the companies chartering them were "unreasonable and oppressive", but they had asked its clients anyway and received no response. We now know that Blue Ocean's clients were, of course, Mr Abramovich's other companies. According to an appeal judgement in 2018, VAT investigators found Blue Ocean had failed to present any evidence the companies chartering the yachts were "engaged in economic activity" and its claim that the boats were used for commercial purposes was rejected. In the end, Cyprus pursued Blue Ocean for the lower figure of €14m (£11.8m). We do not know if the sum was paid - the company failed to attend its own appeal in March 2024 and was dissolved four months later. Cyprus Confidential is an international collaborative investigation launched in 2023 led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) into Cyprus firms which provided corporate and financial services to associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime. ICIJ reporting team: Simon Lock and Eleanor Rose. Media partners include The Guardian, the investigative newsroom Paper Trail Media, the Italian newspaper L'Espresso, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Abramovich dodged millions in tax with superyachts-for-hire scheme
It was Christmas 2011, a year after Roman Abramovich had taken delivery of his new superyacht, Eclipse. But it seemed the oligarch would not be using it over the festive period - records show it had been chartered by a company based in the British Virgin Islands. And yet photographs from Christmas Day that year show Mr Abramovich in the Caribbean sunshine, standing on the swim platform at the rear of the yacht, with Eclipse's large letter-E logo behind him. Charter records such as this were part of a decade-long scheme to mislead tax authorities, now uncovered in an investigation by the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The scheme falsely presented the Russian oligarch's fleet of yachts as a commercial leasing operation, to dodge millions of euros in VAT on their purchase and running costs. "There has been tax evasion," Italian tax lawyer and professor Tommaso Di Tanno told the BBC. "This is criminal." In a statement, lawyers for Mr Abramovich - who now reportedly divides his time between Istanbul, Tel Aviv and the Russian resort of Sochi - said he had "always obtained independent expert professional tax and legal advice" and "acted in accordance" with it. The billionaire, who was sanctioned by the UK in March 2022 over his connection to Vladimir Putin's regime, bought five luxury yachts over the course of the 2000s that were involved in the tax scheme. Among them was the 115m (377ft) Pelorus, which he reportedly lent to Chelsea footballer John Terry for his honeymoon in 2007 - and Eclipse, which at 162.5m (533ft) was once the largest private yacht in the world and worth an estimated $700m (£559m). The scheme to dodge tax on the yachts - and other secrets of the sanctioned oligarch's corporate empire - is laid bare in over 400,000 files and 72,000 emails leaked from a Cypriot corporate service provider, MeritServus. They show how MeritServus administered the oligarch's businesses through a global network of companies owned by a series of trusts of which Mr Abramovich was the beneficiary. The BBC and its media partners have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Cyprus Confidential investigation. We previously revealed Mr Abramovich's financial links to one of Mr Putin's closest associates, accused of holding the president's wealth. The files reveal how Mr Abramovich's advisers helped him avoid paying huge tax bills on the yachts' running costs in EU waters by using companies to hire them out to himself or other companies he controlled. Documents show how the five yachts were leased to a company in Cyprus called Blue Ocean Yacht Management, which chartered them on to a handful of companies in the British Virgin Islands that appeared independent - but which were all in fact controlled by Mr Abramovich. Click here to see the BBC interactive The scheme to dodge VAT in Cyprus was set out in a revealing 2005 memorandum on the proposed "Operating Structure" for the management of Mr Abramovich's yachts. "We want to avoid paying VAT on the purchase price of the yachts and where possible to avoid paying VAT on goods and services provided to the yachts," wrote the memo's author, Jonathan Holloway, then a director of Blue Ocean. You can hear File on 4 Investigates: Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 28 January and at 11:00 on Wednesday 29 January - or on BBC Sounds Although Blue Ocean and the companies hiring the yachts were all owned by Mr Abramovich's trusts, they were intended to appear unconnected "so that an investigator checking on our operation would see it as a legitimate structure", Mr Holloway wrote in the memo he sent to some of Mr Abramovich's closest associates. Mr Holloway warned them they should be "aware of the risks". He wrote: "We all have to recognise that a determined investigator could eventually discover this is an in-house structure with the possible consequences that would entail." Mr Holloway wrote that Blue Ocean, the companies to which it leased the yachts, and the ultimate "customer" should not have the same shareholders, directors or registered addresses, to avoid any "common link" that might arouse suspicion. As the memo noted, Mr Abramovich's lawyer had agreed to put the ownership of Blue Ocean into an entirely separate trust - apparently distancing it from the other companies. Sure enough, ownership of the yacht management company Blue Ocean was subsequently transferred from the oligarch's main trust to a new one, the Neptune Trust. The way Mr Abramovich's companies leased the yachts to each other, Prof Di Tanno told the BBC, was an "artificial structure" that evaded tax - a criminal offence. "My conclusion is that in the case, there has been a tax evasion… because all the parties know exactly what to do in order to hide the reality," he said. Tax expert Rita de la Feria told the BBC she had seen in the yacht scheme "indications" that they "may be misrepresenting information". "If that is the case, then we are now in the realm of evasion," she added. Mr Holloway, who stepped down as a director of Blue Ocean about 15 years ago, told the BBC that he "joined Blue Ocean 20 years ago and was there for a relatively short period of time". He said he had "managed literally hundreds of vessels from many different locations around the world". "I can't be expected to remember the individual circumstances of every vessel I have ever managed," he said. Lawyers representing Mr Abramovich told the BBC he denied "any allegation that he had any knowledge" or was "personally responsible" or liable for "any alleged deception of any government authority" to evade tax. His lawyers said that just as Mr Abramovich sought professional legal and tax advice and acted on it, he expects that "similar advice was sought at the relevant times by those with responsibility for the day-to-day running" of the companies involved in the scheme. If this were a real superyacht leasing business, substantial profits might be expected. However Blue Ocean's accounts show that from 2005 to 2012, its expenses almost matched its income. This meant almost no corporation tax was due as the company's profits were tiny. A note from the Blue Ocean director suggests the close matching of expenses and income was no accident and the company would generate charters when the scheme needed to cover expenses. "At the beginning of each week we will have a meeting in Blue Ocean where we will look at our current bank balances and our cash needs for the next 1~2 weeks [sic]. If we see a need for a cash injection we will raise an appropriate time charter and invoices," he wrote. There is also evidence in the leaked files that charter agreements were backdated. This includes a time charter agreement supposedly signed in July 2005 by Blue Ocean and another Abramovich company in the BVI called Eyke Services. However, records show Eyke Services did not exist at that point - it was not incorporated until a month later. In another case, a director of Blue Ocean requested the production of a backdated and signed time charter in order to obtain delivery of duty-free fuel for Mr Abramovich's 86m (282ft) yacht Ecstasea - which could accommodate 15 guests in eight suites - saving the billionaire $44,000 (£35,000) in tax. In the documents, tax consultants from Deloitte in Cyprus wrote to Mr Holloway, the Blue Ocean director, saying if the ships were pleasure vessels, they would have to pay VAT. But if the vessels were classified as commercial, they would not. A leading superyacht lawyer Benjamin Maltby told the BBC the type of contracts used for many of Mr Abramovich's luxury yacht charters were actually designed for commercial ships carrying dry cargos such as grain or steel. This gives us more evidence that the whole commercial "look" of the operation was a sham. Mr Abramovich's superyacht scheme came under legal scrutiny twice, with varying levels of success, the BBC and Bureau of Investigative Journalism has learned. Richard Bridge captained two of Mr Abramovich's yachts for almost six years from 2006 to 2012, including the Pelorus, and the giant Eclipse, the pride of Abramovich's fleet. A couple of years after he finished working for Mr Abramovich, the captain was stopped and questioned at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport. Italian prosecutors had started proceedings against three of Mr Abramovich's captains - including Mr Bridge - for unpaid excise duties on refuelling and tax evasion. But Mr Bridge told the BBC he had contacted Blue Ocean and "their lawyers got onto it", telling him a few months later the case had been dropped. Italian court records seen by the BBC show proceedings were halted after the lawyers "produced documentation" proving Pelorus was "entered in the registers as a commercial boat as it is used for commercial purposes or for hire". Mr Bridge said he was unaware Mr Abramovich also controlled the companies that were chartering the yachts. In Cyprus, tax officials were separately investigating Blue Ocean over up to €17m (£14.3m) in unpaid VAT, disputing the company's claim to be "zero-rated" for VAT because it was a commercial operation. Blue Ocean's lawyers said demands to provide evidence the vessels had been used commercially by the companies chartering them were "unreasonable and oppressive", but they had asked its clients anyway and received no response. We now know that Blue Ocean's clients were, of course, Mr Abramovich's other companies. According to an appeal judgement in 2018, VAT investigators found Blue Ocean had failed to present any evidence the companies chartering the yachts were "engaged in economic activity" and its claim that the boats were used for commercial purposes was rejected. In the end, Cyprus pursued Blue Ocean for the lower figure of €14m (£11.8m). We do not know if the sum was paid - the company failed to attend its own appeal in March 2024 and was dissolved four months later. Cyprus Confidential is an international collaborative investigation launched in 2023 led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) into Cyprus firms which provided corporate and financial services to associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime. Media partners include The Guardian, the investigative newsroom Paper Trail Media, the Italian newspaper L'Espresso, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).
