The superyacht Alfa Nero which has been abandoned in the Caribbean for more than two years, has a new owner. The 267-foot vessel, complete with a baby grand piano and a swimming pool that turns into a helipad, sold for $40 million last week, said Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the U.S.
He declined to name the buyer, citing a confidentiality agreement. The sale marks the latest attempt to end the years-long Alfa Nero saga. A Russian oligarch abandoned the luxury yacht in Antigua in March 2022, after being sanctioned by the U.
S. Treasury. Then tech billionaire Eric Schmidt tried buying it at auction, only to give up when the sale became a legal quagmire.
Meanwhile, the vessel sat in Antigua’s Falmouth Harbour being tended to by a skeleton crew and costing over a $100,000 a month to maintain. At $40 million, the new Alfa Nero owner will end up paying far less than the $67.6 million that Schmidt, a former Google CEO, had offered last year.
Sanctioned Russian fertilizer billionaire Andrey Guryev had originally bought the Alfa Nero in 2014 for $120 million, the U.S. Treasury Department said — which Guryev denies.
His daughter, Yulia Gurieva-Motlokhov, later stepped forward to claim ownership of the yacht, triggering a legal dispute. “It’s not worth 40 million, it’s worth way more,” said Richard Higgins, a broker with Northrop & Johnson who represented the undisclosed buyer. “They needed to get the boat sold.
” Higgins said the new owner is Euro.