The cost of keeping Luna afloat

Luna’s restriction began with a European Union asset freeze and a German port detention, but her survival depends on a trust structure and a dry-dock arrangement that predate the sanctions. The vessel’s current position in the Ligurian Sea tracks a deliberate routing away from jurisdictions willing to enforce seizure orders.

Luna measures 114.0 metres in length, carries a beam of 20.0 metres, and displaces 5655 gross tonnes. She flies the Marshall Islands flag and registers her home port at Majuro. Her hull number belongs to a cohort of expedition yachts built to cross oceans rather than cruise coastal waters. The exterior lines were drawn by NewCruise of Germany and the interior layout by Donald Starkey. When she entered service on 10 April 2010, her registered owner was Roman Abramovich. The purchase price was estimated at more than €250 million.

In April 2014, the vessel changed hands. Farkhad Akhmedov paid €200 million for Luna. Akhmedov, who holds Azerbaijani citizenship, built his fortune starting in 1986 through Tansley Trading, a company that supplied equipment for the oil and gas industry of the former Soviet Union. He served as a representative in the Federation Council of the Russian Federation until he departed the role in 2009. His net worth stands at approximately $1.4 billion.

The freeze and the dock

Ten months after the sale, Luna entered the dry dock at Lloyd Werft in Bremerhaven. The yard occupies 260,000 square metres and can accommodate vessels drawing up to 11.5 metres. Akhmedov commissioned an extensive refit that cost €50 million. The work lasted sixteen months. The yacht emerged from the slipway in March 2016.

Lloyd Werft was founded in 1863 by the shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd and became part of the Vulkan Group in the 1970s. By 2016 it was the last remaining major dockyard in Bremerhaven, employing 500 workers and focusing solely on ship repair, maintenance and reconstruction. In 2015 Genting Hong Kong purchased a majority stake in the facility, completing the acquisition in 2016 alongside Nordic Yards' Wismar, Warnemunde, and Stralsund yards to form the Lloyd Werft Group. The yard filed for bankruptcy in January 2022 and was sold in March 2022, shortly before the sanctions regime tightened.

The yard's commercial mandate to service existing fleets remained unchanged through the bankruptcy proceedings. A restricted owner cannot easily wire millions from a personal account to a shipyard without triggering compliance flags. The yard requires upfront or guaranteed payment, which the Blue Sea Trust provided to secure the dry-dock slot and cover the €50 million refit bill. The transaction occurred before the asset freezes took effect, insulating the hull from immediate liquidity paralysis. Classification society requirements demand regular hull inspections, propeller shaft alignments, and machinery overhauls that scale directly with tonnage. The trust absorbed these recurring liabilities while the yard maintained its repair-focused business model.

The trust and the dry-dock bill

The financial architecture surrounding the hull shifted during the refit. An English High Court judgement awarded Akhmedov’s ex-wife, Tatyana, a disputed £453 million in matrimonial settlement. The court ruled that Luna should transfer to the Blue Sea Trust, which acts as the owning entity for the Akhmedov family. The precise terms of that trust have not been published; the English High Court records show only that the vessel passed to it following the settlement. Luna remained seaworthy because the trust assumed the operational liabilities.

The restriction operates on two levels: a direct asset freeze imposed by multiple jurisdictions, and a domestic investigation into whether the owner retains control over the hull’s operations.

Sanctions arrived in March 2022. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Switzerland all placed restrictions on Akhmedov. At that point, Luna was still registered in the Marshall Islands and valued at $196 million. Forbes reported in March 2022 that the vessel remained owned by Akhmedov, though the trust held the legal title. German authorities froze the vessel on 12 May 2022. On 23 May, AIS data recorded her stationary in Hamburg. The freeze blocked her departure and triggered a legal review of whether the asset could be confiscated under European enforcement mechanisms.

Public prosecutors returned to the ship in early May 2023. They searched the hull citing that the owner, then sixty-seven years old, had been hiding substantial assets he was suspected to hold in Germany. The search did not result in a permanent seizure order being filed against Luna itself, but it confirmed that German investigators were treating the vessel as part of a broader portfolio of suspected concealed wealth. Maintenance funding follows a different logic than acquisition. The Blue Sea Trust functions as a firewall, paying the annual survey fees, the insurance premiums, and the routine overhaul costs that keep a 114-metre hull compliant with classification society requirements. The distinction between freezing an asset and seizing it is procedural; a freeze prevents transfer and sale, while seizure requires a separate judicial conviction or forfeiture hearing that has not yet concluded.

The Ligurian track

Luna left the Mediterranean in October 2021, prior to the sanctions, having undergone refurbishment in Dubai. She transited the Suez Canal and headed into the Mediterranean, arriving at Lloyd Werft for maintenance. After the May 2022 freeze and the subsequent legal uncertainty, the vessel resumed movement. Her AIS transmitter last broadcast a position at 41.58° N, 12.4° E in the Ligurian Sea. The track shows a deliberate routing that avoids the major enforcement hubs of Northern Europe.

A vessel of this tonnage cannot hide its movements; the satellite data places her exactly where she chooses to be. The combination of a Marshall Islands registry, a trust-owned title, and a dry-dock relationship established before the sanctions created a durable operating model. The European asset freezes remain active, but they do not automatically translate into physical confiscation without a separate judicial process. The German prosecutors’ focus on hidden assets indicates that the investigation is still open, yet Luna continues to sail. The restriction has altered her itinerary, not her existence.