The rich and powerful are using their superyachts for secret meetings far from prying eyes

• Superyachts are booming in popularity, with sales reaching record levels.
• The vessels offer the wealthy rare privacy, and layers of security to shield them from intrusions.

The superyacht is the ultimate symbol of wealth power and status, and the market is booming.

One crucial attraction they offer is extreme privacy: yachts provide a forum for meetings at sea, beyond the jurisdiction of any country and very difficult to spy on.

The New Yorker reported last year on the hidden world of yacht-borne power meetings. The vessels let rich and powerful talk freely and make connections away from prying eyes and scrutiny.

Even who owns the yachts can be hard to figure out — they are often bought by offshore companies on behalf of billionaire owners, giving them an extra shield of privacy. Superyacht owners are said to include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the superyacht sector and its complicated ownership structures came under new scrutiny, with Western nations seeking to seize yachts owned by wealthy Russians subject to sanctions for their ties to the Kremlin.

"These are very private assets and one of the reasons they're bought is for privacy," Sam Tucker, head of superyacht research at market intelligence firm VesselsValue, told the BBC.

The popularity of the vessels is sparking a security race, as spies and tabloid journalists try to breach the layers of privacy on the vessels.

High-end yachts can provide "absolute, complete, and total privacy," Simon Rowland, CEO of Veritas, a London-based company that provides superyacht security, told Insider.

A former Royal Marine, Rowland said that his job was to screen for every imaginable threat and potential privacy breach on board the vessels.

His works involves sweeping charter yachts for tiny surveillance devices, fending off drones sent by paparazzi to photograph his wealthy clients, or conducting background checks on crew members to root out moles.

"Drones are increasingly a concern for superyacht owners," he said. The level of caution among owners varies, he added — not everyone goes all out.

The vessels are often made in the Netherlands, Germany, or Italy, sometimes custom built to exacting specifications. Often crew members working on the vessels must sign sweeping NDAs preventing them from revealing information about the yachts or their owners, the yacht industry publication Dockwalk reported.

The cost of the vessels varies, with brokerage firm Edmiston saying that costs can range from around $1 million for a modest vessel, all the way up to hundreds of millions for large, custom made yachts.

One example yacht, Azzam, was built by German firm Lürssen Yachts in 2013 for the late Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, former president of the United Arab Emirates. It is 68 feet long and is reported to have cost around $600 million, making it among the world's most expensive, Forbes said.