Wake · Issue No. 01 · Summer 2026

Sailing Yacht A

Andrey Melnichenko, via Bermuda-registered Valla Yachts and a family trust structure — impounded in Trieste since March 2022; EU Court of Justice preliminary ruling (June 2026) leaves the seizure standing while the fight continues before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court.

Nobody commissions Sailing Yacht A because they want to fit in. Andrey Melnichenko — plasma-physics student turned banker, then the man who built EuroChem into a fertiliser colossus and SUEK into Russia's coal heavyweight — had already scandalised the anchorage once with Motor Yacht A, the 119-metre Starck-designed Blohm+Voss that looked like a submarine crossed with a stealth bomber. For the encore, he and Philippe Starck went further: 142.81 metres of mirror-hulled provocation, delivered by Nobiskrug in Kiel in 2017, carrying three freestanding carbon masts — the mainmast 100 metres above the waterline — that remain the tallest freestanding composite structures ever floated. Twelve and a half thousand gross tons. Twenty guests, fifty-four crew, hybrid diesel-electric drive, 21 knots, and a glass observation pod set below the waterline so the owner could watch the sea from inside his own keel. She is either the most beautiful thing in yachting or an affront to it, and Melnichenko has never much cared which you think.

Trouble found her early. Weeks after delivery, Gibraltar impounded her over a shipbuilder's claim — subcontractors chasing roughly $17 million in extra payments from Valla Yachts, the Bermuda company that owns her on Melnichenko's behalf. That skirmish ran on appeal until 2019. It would prove a rehearsal.

On 9 March 2022, the EU sanctioned Melnichenko as one of the businessmen "providing a substantial source of revenue" to the Russian state — he had, damningly, been in the Kremlin the day the tanks rolled. That same day, his interests in EuroChem and SUEK moved to his wife, Aleksandra. Days later the Guardia di Finanza boarded his masterpiece in Trieste and froze her, booking her value at €530 million. She has not left the Gulf of Trieste since, save one heavily escorted run to a Venetian yard — Italian patrol boats riding shotgun lest half a billion euros of carbon and mirror-glass make a dash for international waters.

Here is the part the marina bar savours: she is now Italy's problem. The Agenzia del Demanio pays to berth her, crew her skeleton maintenance, guard her around the clock and keep drones off her decks — roughly €10 million a year, call it $35,000 a day, every day, for more than four years. Melnichenko, whose fortune Forbes put at $25.2 billion in 2023 (top of the Russian list), has spent that time on the offensive rather than in mourning. He has challenged the sanctions in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and hauled the seizure itself before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court — which blinked, and asked the EU Court of Justice for guidance. In June 2026 the answer came back: "ownership" and "control" reach into trust structures even where the beneficiary can't touch the assets. The seizure stands, for now, and the case rolls on in Rome. If he ultimately wins, he takes the yacht home and Italy eats every euro it spent keeping her.

Until then the world's largest sail-assisted yacht sits off Trieste like a monument to the whole strange decade — masts taller than the cathedral, sails furled, meter running. Starck once said the boat was designed to make people think. Mission, if nothing else, accomplished.

The record

• Her three freestanding carbon masts, the main soaring 100m above the waterline, are the tallest freestanding composite structures ever put to sea.
• Gibraltar impounded her in February 2017, weeks after delivery, over a $17m shipbuilder-subcontractor claim — a dispute that ran on appeal until 2019.
• Italy's Guardia di Finanza froze her in Trieste in March 2022, valuing her at €530m (~$611m).
• Keeping her costs the Italian state roughly €10m a year — around $35,000 a day in berthing, guarding and maintenance, drones included.
• On 9 March 2022, the day EU sanctions landed, Melnichenko transferred his EuroChem and SUEK interests to his wife Aleksandra — a move EU courts are still untangling.