Making waves aboard a tycoon's yacht

The pillars are buckling, large slabs crash to the floor, dust and mortar anoint our brows.

The financial temple is collapsing even as unexpected optimists like Prime Minister Stephen Harper speak brightly of bargains to be had. There are other optimists, too.

"It's a good time to be buying a yacht," says Damien Sibley. "If you're cash rich."

Ah, those details. Sibley, by the way, is the managing director of Hyde Yachts, the newest reincarnation of one of the U.K.'s oldest ship brokers. They sell behemoths of the water.

How cash rich? Well, a Hamburg boatyard is currently constructing a luxury yacht for $500 million. That's right: $500 million.

Of course, you get quite a bit for your money: 168 metres of luxury (almost the length of two football fields), a helipad as well as a submarine and missile warning apparatus.

This yacht, we are told, has been ordered by a Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich. He is not yacht poor, he has four others already. He also owns several valuable chunks of London real estate and a very expensive British soccer club, into which he has sunk hundreds of millions of his vast but now shrinking fortune.

An even richer Russian

Oleg Deripaska is rumoured to be an even richer Russian. Canadians may have heard of him. He bought a 20 per cent stake in Magna, the giant Canadian autoparts firm, and then, as his fortune contracted this fall during the global credit crunch, sold it off.

He also bought a yacht. Here he showed unusual parsimony for a billionaire: he bought it second-hand, for a mere $160 million.

Deripaska named his yacht the Queen K  and this summer it was berthed off the Greek island of Corfu.

Guests came. Curiously, a couple of them were senior British politicians. That is curious because Britain is locked in a diplomatic cold war with Russia over, among other things, the polonium poisoning in London of ex-Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.

The person British police suspect was the hit man in that case, Andrei Lugovoi, and for whom they issued an extradition request was instead protected by the Vladimir Putin regime and subsequently elected to the Russian parliament. He now enjoys parliamentary immunity from arrest.

The poorer of the oligarchs

Deripaska is a close economic associate of Russia's former-president, now Prime Minister Putin. Deripaska also controls much of Russia's aluminum output.

He managed to grab control of this resource roughly 10 years ago in the same opaque manner in which other so-called oligarchs made their fortunes. That veil of opacity has recently been peeled back in an English court.

Deripaska is being sued by another, poorer oligarch, now living in London, for $4 billion. In a preliminary finding, the British judge wrote of Deripaska's links to a Russian mob boss in the 1990s and questioned the truthfulness of his testimony.

The mafia boss was Anton Malevsky, head of the so-called Ismailovo gang in Moscow. He was killed in a freak parachuting accident in 2001.

According to the judge, Deripaska told a Swiss court in February 2005 that he knew Malevsky only by name. But Malevsky's widow insisted she and her late husband had stayed at Deripaska's home. In addition, Malevsky's brother had a 10 per cent stake in Deripaska's company.

"Deripaska appears to have sought to hide any connection with Mr. Malevsky from a Swiss investigating magistrate," the British judge wrote. "Mrs. Malevsky says that [Deripaska's claim] is completely untrue, and, in the light of her evidence, that seems likely to be so."

No berth in the U.S.

Deripaska's dubious connections may be the reason he has been refused a U.S. visa. He also doesn't have a British visa, athough that appears to be by choice. But he does have British friends in high places.

The first is Peter Mandelson. Last summer he was the European Trade Commissioner and in charge of tariff negotiations with Russia. One of the tariffs under discussion was on aluminum.

Mandelson apparently spent a night on the Queen K. Mandelson recently changed jobs and is now minister of business in the British cabinet.

The second friend is George Osborne, the Conservative opposition's finance critic. He was apparently fishing for a donation to his party, a donation of $100,000.

The Deripaska connection came out because Osborne, who is young and brash, thought he would score political points by leaking details of a conversation he had with Mandelson in Corfu.

Mandelson, Osborne said, "dripped poison" about Gordon Brown, the British prime minister who is now Mandelson's boss.

Mandelson retaliated by letting it be known that Osborne was touching up Deripaska for political money. Then it came out that Mandelson was on the yacht, too.

Both men have mud on their suits. Osborne has admitted he acted "in error." Mandelson is huffing and puffing that he was not in any conflict of interest but he has been forced to admit that he had several earlier meetings in Moscow and elsewhere with the Russian aluminum magnate.

Who rules the waves

But what is the attraction of a yacht for politicians? Perhaps it wasn't just the one yacht, the Queen K, that was the attraction.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch had his moored nearby in Corfu as well, as did his daughter. Family yachts. A luxury tour of world money and influence in three hops, without leaving the island. So much concentrated power.

Still, a yacht adds a little something to these intrigues, even when decommissioned.

The USS Sequoia was once the American presidential yacht of Franklin Roosevelt. For decades, even when moored, other presidents used it as a meeting place to impress guests.

Gorge H.W. Bush entertained then-Chinese premier Li Peng on board, Richard Nixon negotiated a nuclear arms treaty with then Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev (and spent his last day as president on the yacht before resigning in disgrace). John Kennedy was on the Sequoia with his advisers discussing how to avoid the end of the world during the Cuban missile crisis.

Perhaps, to keep its politicians from going astray, the British government should consider aquiring a small yacht of its own. It had one once, of course, the Royal Yacht Britannia, sold off in a fit of economy by the government now in power.

It is said there are some great deals to be had these days. Of course, only if you are cash rich.