Four freighters and a luxury yacht in six days. Like a hunting board, the services of Bercy wanted to make tangible, Thursday, March 3, the impact of the economic sanctions taken once morest economic or political personalities deemed close to Vladimir Putin. the yacht True love, 86 meters long, owned by a company controlled by the oligarch Igor Setchine, boss of the oil giant Rosneft, was seized by customs on the night of March 2 to 3, in the La Ciotat shipyard (Bouches-du -Rhone). According to the press release from the Ministry of Economy, this boat had arrived in January for maintenance work which was supposed to last until April. Corn, “at the time of control [par les douanes], the ship was making arrangements to sail urgently, without having completed the planned work”.
Officially, the 510 Russian and Belarusian personalities and entities now appearing on the European sanctions list can only be subject to a freezing of their financial assets and their real estate. In other words, people retain ownership of these assets, but cannot transfer or sell them. It is the attempted subtraction of theTrue love to the freezing measure which justified the seizure. This ship, estimated at 120 million euros, has a swimming pool on its main deck that can be transformed into a heliport. For this seizure – a precautionary measure that only customs or justice can order in the context of an investigation – to turn into final confiscation, it will require a final judicial conviction of its owner.
As for the merchant ships, only one is seized. the Baltic-Leader, owned by the Russian bank PSB on the list of financial institutions sanctioned by the European Union, had also tried to leave France on Saturday. It is immobilized in Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais), while the other three are “frozen”, in particular in Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine) and Fos-sur-Mer (Bouches-du- Rhone). Their commercial cargo, however, is not affected by the freeze.
Thursday evening, the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, organized a meeting at Place Vendôme in Paris with his counterpart in the economy, Bruno Le Maire, and his colleague in charge of public accounts and customs, Olivier Dussopt, for “think regarding how to better articulate administrative freezing measures with judicial measures and, behind, seizure or confiscation, to better operate synergies between Tracfin [le service de renseignement contre le blanchiment d’argent] and the floors, they say at the chancellery.
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