Inside the Wild International Battle Over An Abandoned Superyacht

In an inlet in Antigua, surrounded by touristy hotels and kitschy cafes, a yacht nearly three times the size of a basketball court and twice the price of a luxury private jet sits unused, awaiting its fate.

The Alfa Nero, one of the largest superyachts in the world, is the reported—but not confirmed— property of Russian oligarch Andrey Guryev, a top target of sanctions imposed by the U.S. after the invasion of Ukraine last year. Thanks to a tangled mess of international restrictions and offshore ownership, its future is now the subject of a three-way battle between Guryev’s daughter, the government of Antigua and Barbuda, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. And none of them know where the Alfa Nero will be this time next year.

“This whole damn thing has been like a Tom Clancy novel,” Darwin Telemaque, chief executive of the Antigua and Barbuda Port Authority, told the London Times last month. “And I’m stuck in the middle.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.