February 2017
There was a minor lunar eclipse visible here the other night. We observed it walking to the Old San Juan bus station after listening to a woodwind quintet (flute, clarinet, oboe, English horn and bassoon) in one of the city’s many plazas. The mega yacht Eclipse is in port. If anyone on the yacht had been interested, they would have had a good view of the lunar eclipse. They would have missed the quintet though. Their loss.
I wonder if the two events are related. Do they show Russian attempts to meddle in solar system affairs? These sorts of questions keep me awake at night.
The Eclipse is the second largest privately owned yacht yet built. It is said to have an anti-missile warning system, an armored cabin, and a laser system to interfere with paparazzi’s cameras. I took the image at the top of the page; the system must not have activated. She was built by the Bloom + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, where, prior to World War II, the battleship Bismarck was built. More recently, the shipyard built the super yacht A. (See my earlier posts about A).
Eclipse is 533 feet long and displaces 13,000 tons. By comparison, a US Navy Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer is 504 feet long, and displaces about 9,800 tons. The Eclipse was designed by the naval architecture firm Francis Design; the exterior and interior were designed by Terence Tisdale Design. She carries a crew of about 70, a three-person submarine, three landing boats. Her guests use 23 guest cabins, three swimming pools (one can be converted to a dance floor), several hot tubs, a disco hall, and two helicopter pads. At an estimated $1.5 billion, she cost about as much as an Arleigh Burke destroyer. And they, to the best of my knowledge, don’t have hot tubs.
The USS Arleigh Burke, a guided missile destroyer that costs about as much as the Eclipse.
Eclipse was launched in 2009 and is registered in Bermuda. She is listed for charters through SuperYachtsMonaco, although this may be a tax dodge since charter yachts are exempt from European property tax. The Eclipse comes to the Caribbean each winter to pick up guests arriving at the international airport in St, Martin. She then travels to the owner’s estate on nearby St. Bart, close to St. Martin and about 150 miles east of Puerto Rico. By the way, St. Barts is one of five French overseas collectives and as such is a French state with representation in the French legislature. The Euro is the official currency there, as it is on the French side of St. Martin.
The Russian multibillionaire Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich (born 1966) owns Eclipse. For all his money, Abramovich had a rather modest start, selling imported rubber duckies with his first wife, Olga, from a Moscow apartment. I wonder if his business was in anyway connected with the release of 28,800 yellow rubber duckies and other floatable bathtub toys in the Pacific. That was the result of a container ship accident and is documented in Moby Duck, by Donovan Hohn, which was a New York Times notable book of the year, in 2011.
Roman Abramovich, Russian multibillionaire and owner of Eclipse.
Abramovich’s horizons soon broadened, aided by perestroika, which lead to the privatization of Russian state-owned enterprises. After forays into several small businesses in the early 1990s, (body guard recruitment, doll manufacture, tire retreading), he, together with entrepreneur Boris Berezovsky, purchased controlling interests in the Russian oil company Sibfnet, in 1995. It is alleged they, by means of bribes and other forms of persuasion, bought the company for far less than the market value. They each paid US$100 million for a company whose net worth was estimated to be US$2.7 billion. They both turned their purchase into multibillion dollar profits. Their purchase was no doubt assisted by then Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin, who invited Abramovich and his family to live in a Kremlin apartment.
Abramovich had a falling out with Beresovsky when , in 2000, Abramovich gained 100% interest in Several Russian aluminum mines and smelters and formed Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum company. Beresovsky felt he had been cheated by Abramovich during the so called Russian aluminum wars, and responded with a multibillion dollar lawsuit heard in a London court. The case was dismissed in August 2012, after the High Court judge found Berezovsky to be “an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes”, whereas Abramovich was seen as “a truthful, and on the whole reliable, witness”.
The aluminum wars did not keep Abramovich away from politics. In 1999, he was elected governor of the remote Russian province of Chukotka, in far western Siberia, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Given their close proximity, I wonder if he and Sarah Palin got to know each other. Abramovich, unlike Palin, showed a philanthropic streak as he donated an estimated US$1.3 billion to various projects there.
Abramovich has been a close confidant of Vladimir Putin. He recommended to Yeltsin, in 1999, that Putin be his successor as the Russian president, and interviewed each candidate for a cabinet post in Putin’s government. Chris Hutchins, a Putin biographer, states that Putin treats Abramovich like a favorite son. His influence on Putin presumably continues to this day.
Vladimir Putin, good friend of Roman Abramovich, owner of the Eclipse.
Outside of Russia, Abramovich is known as the owner of the Chelsea F.C., a team in the English premier soccer league. Abramovich purchased the company that owns the football club in 2003 and immediately embarked upon a program to bring Chelsea to the same international prominence as Manchester United and Real Madrid.
Chelsea finished their first season under the new ownership in second place, up from fourth the previous year. Abramovich rules Chelsea as George Steinbrenner once ruled the New York Yankees, with expensive free agents, frequent changes in managers, and success on the field.
So there, in a nutshell, is the owner of Eclipse, which left port the day before yesterday. I wonder how much Russian influence she left behind.
Notes and Sources: See Wikipedia entries for Yacht Eclipse, Roman Abramovich, Russian aluminum wars, Vladimir Putin, and Chukotka.
The image of the USS Arleigh Burke is by .
Moby Duck: The True Story of 28.800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea & of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists & Fools Including the Author Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn is a worthy read. I enjoyed it immensely.