A lawsuit totalling over €35 million has been filed against the Republic of Croatia for the seizure of the yacht "Royal Romance", which belongs to Lanelia Holdings, a company owned by Russian property tycoon Alexei Inkin. Pročitaj više

N1 Zagreb has analysed the background of this dispute, which also mentions the name of a close Putin confidant who had been arrested in Ukraine.

The yacht was blocked in the harbour of Trogir at the request of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. It is linked to Viktor Medvedchuk, a powerful Russian tycoon who is under investigation in Ukraine. The blockade of the yacht was requested in order to compensate for the damage allegedly caused by Medvedchuk.

Complex case

The case is extremely complex and so far, there has been a lot of dubious public information about it. There has been speculation that it involves a ship that has been blocked due to international sanctions against Russia following its aggression against Ukraine. Inkin’s lawyers told N1 that the “Royal Romance” was detained in Croatia as part of the case against Medvedchuk.

According to the lawyers, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office accuses him of high treason, more precisely of concluding expensive contracts for the purchase of coal in 2015. Although this investigation has been ongoing since 2016, the trial has not yet taken place. in 2022, the Ukrainian public prosecutor’s office filed an application to block the luxury yacht, which no longer belongs to Medvedchuk but to Inkin.

Inkin believes that Croatia had absolutely no reason to seize his ship. He claims that he has suffered a loss of more than €35 million in these two years because his property was unlawfully restricted.

He had to maintain the yacht, which is estimated to be worth around 130 million euros, and pay for the berth in the Trogir marina, which he could not do as he was planning to earn money by renting it out.

Court battle for the yacht

The District Court in Split has been trying to obtain relevant information from Ukraine about the entire case. A few days ago, the court in Split decided to extend the order to seize the yacht from Inkin’s company, which is the official owner, and hand it over to Arma, the Ukrainian agency for the management of assets acquired through corruption and other crimes.

However, this decision is not yet final, so the yacht has not yet been handed over to the Ukrainian authorities.

N1 has looked at the documents Inkin is using to prove to the Croatian authorities that his yacht was illegally blocked in Trogir. His legal team claims that there is no evidence on the basis of which the yacht could be confiscated and extradited to Ukraine.

The yacht was detained in Croatia to ensure the payment of illegally obtained profits. The case concerns the proceedings against Medvedchuk, who, according to available information, is accused of having concluded dubious contracts in Ukraine in 2015 for the purchase of coal worth around three billion UAH, i.e., around €165 million. According to Inkin’s lawyers, however, it has not been clarified whether he earned money illegally.

Nonetheless, they clarify, the yacht has been temporarily confiscated under a seizure order, although, they add, Medvedchuk and the unknown persons suspected along with him are not being charged by the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office with pecuniary benefits.

A cacophony of information

Specifically, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office suspects that Medvedchuk “made the Ukrainian energy sector dependent on the Russian Federation and the terrorist organisations there” by buying coal at high prices from companies in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions

At the same time, according to the available court documents, Medvedchuk’s assets worth over UAH 5.6 billion have already been blocked in Ukraine, from which potential compensation payments can be confiscated in the event of a guilty verdict.

Various unofficial information about this case has been circulating for months – from those that it is a yacht that has been blocked due to sanctions against certain Russian tycoons, that the Croatian authorities are putting pressure on the court to hand over the yacht to Ukraine, to those that the handover to Ukraine has already been decided, although, as the court has confirmed to us, an invalid decision has been made.

Incidentally, Medvedchuk was a Ukrainian oligarch and a friend of Vladimir Putin. After the Russian aggression against Ukraine, he went into hiding in Kyiv, but was eventually charged with treason in the coal business. He was exchanged for a group of Ukrainian prisoners and now lives in Russia, although the proceedings against him for economic offences in Ukraine have been ongoing for more than seven years.

Diplomatic and legal entanglements

As a further argument against a possible decision to hand over the yacht to Ukraine, Inkin’s lawyers cited in the previously filed constitutional complaint and now in the appeal the fact that the yacht was built from 2011 to 2015, when the last instalment was paid.

The suspicions against Medvedchuk date back to 2016 and the alleged embezzlement took place in 2015. They therefore conclude that the yacht cannot possibly be linked to the dubious contracts for which the Ukrainian authorities are investigating Medvedchuk.

As a result of these diplomatic and legal entanglements, Croatia has now ended up in court proceedings costing just over €35 million. If the yacht is handed over to Ukraine, Inkin’s lawyers have announced that they will add the full value of €130 million to the claim.