Wake · Issue No. 01 · Summer 2026

Flying Fox

Sold June 2025 in an off-market deal to a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family (reportedly Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan); emerged from a five-month Lürssen Hamburg refit in March 2026 repainted white and renamed Hadar — now private, off the charter market. Previously linked to Domodedovo airport billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik.

The world's largest charter yacht was, officially, nobody's in particular. That was the point. When Flying Fox emerged from Lürssen in 2019 — 136 metres of Espen Øino exterior over 9,022 gross tonnes, Mark Berryman's interiors below — the press decided she must be Jeff Bezos's. She wasn't. Bezos was simply the most plausible name anyone could pin to a boat this size that no one would claim.

The name that stuck, eventually, was Dmitry Kamenshchik: the Moscow billionaire who owns Domodedovo airport, a man who built a fortune on runways and never once confirmed the yacht was his. He didn't need to. Flying Fox ran as the crown of Imperial Yachts' Monaco stable, offered from €3 million a week — the largest yacht ever available for hire, full stop. The arithmetic was elegant: let the merely very rich subsidise the asset between the owner's own trips.

And they queued. The 400-square-metre spa runs across two decks — hammam, cryosauna, massage suites — above a 12-metre pool set athwartships. Fifty-five crew, trained across roles, staffed everything from the dive centre to the onboard hospital. In September 2021 Beyoncé and Jay-Z took her through the Mediterranean at a reported $3.5 million for the week, and reportedly left the crew a $630,000 tip on the way down the passerelle. As product-market fit goes, hard to argue.

Then February 2022, and the invasion. That March, Flying Fox called at Santo Domingo and found agents of the Dominican prosecutor's office and US Homeland Security Investigations coming up the gangway, citing a money-laundering and arms-trafficking enquiry. She sat at the quay for a month while Washington and Santo Domingo circled each other. Kamenshchik wasn't personally sanctioned. The yacht wasn't seized. On 22 April she departed — with permission, and without explanation — and made for Turkey, one of the very few sanctioned-adjacent hulls to slip the net entire.

OFAC caught up that June, blacklisting the vessel itself through its Imperial Yachts connection — the brokerage stood accused of servicing Russia's elite, and its liquidation in 2023–24 quietly cut the cord. In October 2024 the Treasury did something it almost never does: it took Flying Fox off the list. Cleared, insured, back in class and managed from Bluewater's Dubai office, she returned to charter aimed at the Red Sea, the Seychelles and the Maldives — everywhere, in truth, except the ports that remembered her.

The coda came fast. June 2025: sold, off-market, price undisclosed. September 2025: back into Lürssen's Hamburg sheds. March 2026: out again, the grey-blue repainted pearl white, the name Hadar on the transom, and a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family — Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, by persistent report — holding the papers. She is off the charter market now: a private ship in a fleet where, alongside Blue and A+, 136 metres makes her the runabout.

Kamenshchik, if it ever was Kamenshchik, managed the cleanest exit of the sanctions era: built the biggest charter yacht in history, rode out a boarding, out-waited OFAC, and sold into royalty at the top of the market. Not bad for a man who never admitted he owned a boat.

The record

• At 136m and 9,022 GT, Flying Fox was the largest yacht ever offered for charter — from €3 million a week via Imperial Yachts.
• Her spa covers 400 m² across two decks, with hammam, cryosauna and a 12-metre athwartships pool.
• Beyoncé and Jay-Z's September 2021 Med charter reportedly ran $3.5 million for the week — plus a $630,000 crew tip.
• US Homeland Security agents boarded her in Santo Domingo in March 2022; she left a month later, unseized, bound for Turkey.
• OFAC sanctioned her in June 2022 and delisted her in October 2024; by March 2026 she was white-hulled, renamed Hadar, and privately owned in Abu Dhabi.

Photo: Stefan Brending (2eight) · CC BY-SA 3.0 de · Wikimedia Commons