(Bloomberg) — At the heart of the largest money fight that London’s divorce courts have ever known sits the Luna — a 115-meter (380-foot), nine-deck luxury motor yacht holed up at a berth in a dusty marina in Dubai.
The Luna is the largest and most expensive single asset held by companies linked to oil and gas tycoon Farkhad Akhmedov, who bought the vessel from his fellow billionaire Roman Abramovich. It is also the prized target for Tatiana Akhmedova, Farkhad’s former wife of 21 years. Worth about 250 million pounds ($353 million), seizing control of the yacht would go a long way toward satisfying a London court’s 450-million-pound divorce award in her favor.
But that, Tatiana is finding out, won’t be easy. With settlement talks with her former husband going nowhere, she has taken to fighting her battle in multiple jurisdictions, from Dubai and Liechtenstein to the Marshall Islands. What the money chase shows is that a ruling from a court in London may not be worth the paper it’s written on when pitted against someone who can move assets across the globe and is determined to frustrate the order.
Farkhad has said he will do everything to ensure that his former wife can’t get her hands on his fortune. The case sheds some light on how the world’s wealthy are able to protect assets through regulation arbitrage, playing one jurisdiction against another, creating opaque trusts and transferring ownership.
After the latest court ruling by a London judge last month — this time involving the couple’s 27-year-old son Temur, to whom Tatiana alleges his father transfered assets — Farkhad said the case “is beneath contempt and changes nothing.” The son was more conciliatory, with his spokesman saying he has never sought to take sides between his two parents.
