Social media pictures aboard luxury superyachts, taken by those partying with oligarchs, are being used by investigators tracking down the assets of Russia's elite and destroying their all-important anonymity amid the crisis in Ukraine.
VICE senior reporter Greg Walters has been writing about how influencers and "beautiful people" posting glamorous selfies aboard Russian oligarchs' yachts are helping to bring down the incredibly rich people around Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A picture taken on March 3, 2022 in a shipyard of La Ciotat, southern France, shows Amore Vero, which French authorities say is owned by a company linked to Igor Sechin, chief executive of Russian energy giant Rosneft. Photo: Nicolas Tucat / AFP
Instagram has played a role in identifying oligarchical assets, Walters tells Jim Mora.
“You can think about it this way, you have these very rich people who have some of the fanciest boats in the world and once they have them, they seem to have an inclination to want to party with very beautiful people.
“The problem with beautiful people these days is they have Instagram accounts and they like to post pictures of themselves enjoying this beautiful life … and that can create problems if you’ve got a large amount of unaccounted for wealth.”
In one case, the social media posts of Polina Kovaleva, who is said to be part of Russia’s foreign minister’s “second family”, led to her being sanctioned.
“A group of Russian opposition researchers helped document her lifestyle by looking over her social media and blasting it out, on Twitter especially,” Walters says.
“After the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine broke out, a tweet showing her luxurious lifestyle, her standing in front of an emerald green pool wearing a bikini or playing tennis in London’s Hyde Park, went viral and within days she was sanctioned, which meant all of her property in the UK was no longer accessible to her and she couldn’t get a visa to the country.”
I would like you to meet Polina Kovaleva. Polina is a 26-year-old glamorous Russian girl from London. She lives in a huge apartment in Kensington and loves to party, her instagram feed looks like a non-stop holiday. That’s not unheard of, but there is one small detail…(THREAD) pic.twitter.com/6OsVGjPxQQ
— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) March 10, 2022
The locations of these superyachts, even if not mentioned in posts, are sometimes identified by sleuths looking at the backgrounds, he says.
“There’s a whole cottage industry now of essentially private investigators who are combing the world for these yachts.
“Many of them normally have transponders in them for safety reasons … and many of them still have them on, you’d have a crew probably insist on keeping that sort of thing on.
“But in some cases when they have been turned off, or when there have been questions, you have also seen just people with iPhones spotting one of these yachts.”
It’s difficult to hide these yachts from sight, because some are as large as luxury apartment buildings, with four or five storeys, and cost about $US600 million, he says.
“So, they hide their connection to the yacht in a different way.
“What the billionaires around Putin will do is create very, very creative ownership structures in which you have shell companies in offshore locations that own other shell companies in other offshore locations to create a kind of Russian nesting doll of confusing legal ownership.”
Earlier this year, French authorities claimed they had seized the Amore Vero yacht belonging to one of Vladimir Putin’s oldest and closest advisers, Igor Sechin.
Sechin never admitted to owning the yacht, but a team of journalists uncovered potential links using his ex-wife’s Instagram posts, Walters says.
“He had no known connection to this $120 million yacht ... at the time it was called the Saint Princess Olga, which happened to share the same name as Igor Sechin’s then wife.
“These investigators poured over her Instagram and managed to notice that in one picture … you would see that the furniture and the shape of the yacht that appears is exactly the same as what you can see when you look at the pictures of the Saint Princess Olga that were published by the manufacturer of the yacht or that exists in yachting magazines.”
Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin smiles during a signing ceremony, with Russian President Vladimir Putin seen in the background. Photo: Sergey Guneev / Sputnik / Sputnik via AFP
Sechin sued a Russian newspaper in court over an article which linked him to the yacht and won his case, and the paper published a retraction.
“But France’s ministry of economy and finance said recently that Sechin is the main shareholder of the company that owns the Amore Vero,” Walter says.
Sanctioning companies or oligarchs is relatively easy, he says, but to confiscate their property would require proof of a connection to a crime.
“I wouldn’t necessarily bet that many of these assets will ultimately be completely taken away from these billionaires.”
Walters also doesn’t believe that the pressured Russian elite have enough political power, as they did before Putin, to trigger regime change.
“Those power sources that could have, from the business world, made a difference or changed the direction of the country really no longer have that voice.
“I think we have seen that in this conflict, when many of these oligarchs have been increasingly vocal at their own risk of their criticism of this decision to invade Ukraine, and it hasn’t caused Putin to move one inch.
“I don’t think at this point you could look to the rich people around the Kremlin and say that they are going to be a force of opposition, that simply doesn’t seem very likely.”
