Billionaire Chelsea boss Roman Abramovich is topping other high fliers with private jets - by splashing out on his own airport, it was reported today (monday).
Abramovich is heading a syndicate of Russian tycoons in a bid to snap up Tassignano airport in northern Italy as an investment.
The terminal - worth more than 4 million GBP - is near a settlement of exclusive villas and holiday homes, reports Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich’s mega-yacht ‘Eclipse’ has finally made a preliminary launch at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany where it was built secretly for more than two years.
Estimated to have cost around $500 million, the vessel is nearly 170 meters long.
It has room for 24 guests, with a crew of 70. It is 13,000 tonnes, and can achieve a top speed of 33 knots. Its cruising speed is 22 knots.
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich lost one of the yachts in a game of poker, Russian newspapers reported on Monday, prompting a strong denial from the oligarch.
“The story is absolutely, completely, entirely false,” Abramovich spokesman John Mann told AFP after three Russian daily newspapers published versions of the story that originated in the Italian press.
The popular daily Moskovsky Komsomelets said the oligarch lost the $500,000 yacht while playing poker in Barcelona, which he was visiting to watch Chelsea in action.
For most of the decade, Russian billionaires spent hundreds of millions of dollars on boats, jets, expensive art and the occasional football team.
But, despite strained bank accounts and public outrage, the tycoons have been loath to part with their expensive trinkets, choosing instead to hunker down and wait for better days.
To be sure, these are not happy days for the country’s superrich. In Forbes magazine’s latest ranking of the world’s wealthiest people, Russia’s billionaires had an estimated collective loss of $369 billion last year, and two-thirds fell from the list altogether.
Pelorus is the world’s fourteenth largest private yacht at 377 feet 3 inches (115 metres) in length, with a price tag of US-$300 million. It was built at the Lürssen yard in Bremen, Germany to the design of Tim Heywood and was launched in 2003.
It was briefly owned by a Miles businessman who sold it to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich (the owner of British soccer club Chelsea FC) the following year. Abramovich had it refitted to his own requirements by Blohm & Voss.
This included the addition of a second helicopter pad forward, four new zero-speed stabilisers and modifications to the exhaust, mast and stern.
