- A petition is calling for a seized superyacht to become a hotel for Ukrainian refugees.
- A retired engineer set up the petition to reuse Amore Vero, which is linked to oligarch Igor Sechin.
A petition which wants to turn a seized superyacht, believed to belong to a sanctioned Russian oil magnate, into a hotel for Ukrainian refugees has received nearly 30,000 signatures.
The 80-foot Amore Vero was seized by French authorities in March and is being held in the port of La Ciotat, east of the city of Marseille on France's southern coast.
"I'm angry," Philippe Bonneau, who created the petition, told Bloomberg. Bonneau, an 80-year-old retired engineer, can see the yacht from his home, Bloomberg reports. "It has no sense to be there without being used," he added.
The petition has amassed 28,875 signatures at the time of writing.
The owner of the Amore Vero is not publicly known, although it has been heavily linked to Igor Sechin, chief executive of the Russian oil giant PJSC Rosneft.
Sechin was sanctioned by the US government in 2014, following Russia's annexation of Crimea, per Bloomberg. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, Sechin was among the first prominent Russians to be sanctioned by the bloc. The US Treasury also introduced further sanctions against him and his family members in 2022.
Sechin has denied owning the yacht, but French customs officials said in March that he had been identified as the main shareholder of the company that owns the Amore Vero.
The listed owner of Amore Vero is Kazimo Trade & Invest Limited, a firm registered in the British Virgin Islands, according to an online tool tracking Russian assets run by investigative journalists of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
The yacht has been in La Ciotat since January, where it was undergoing repairs, according to French customs officials.
It can cost millions of dollars a year to crew and maintain yachts while authorities work out what to do with the assets, a process that can take some time due to often complex ownership structures involving shell companies.
The petition has no legal weight, but Bonneau is not the first to suggest that money from the assets should be given to the Ukrainian people. Ukrainian officials, including the country's President Volodymyr Zelensky, have called for seized mansions, boats, and assets to be sold in aid of Ukraine's defense.
In September, officials in Gibraltar completed the first sale of a seized superyacht since the beginning of the war. The $75 million Axioma was seized after JPMorgan won a court order against its owner, oligarch Dmitry Pumpyansky.