BILLIONAIRES’ OF THE SAIL CENTURY
Got a spare 150m? Join the queue at the Monaco Yacht Show where a post-Covid boom has seen the super rich splashing out as never before
Life in Britain may be full of energy worries, soaring bills and the petrol pumps running dry — and even fears of a new winter of discontent. But in Port Hercule, Monaco’s gorgeous natural harbour on the Cote d’Azur, it’s clear that in some places things are as rosy as the chilled Whispering Angel wine that pours from magnum-sized bottles.
i’m at the Monaco Yacht Show, the largest and most prestigious display of yachts, where the world’s wealthiest have descended to buy and sell the most spectacular luxury vessels on the planet.
Last year, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the show was cancelled for the first time in its 30-year history.
But now, the event and the wider yachting industry are witnessing a boom, with the pentup spending power held captive during the pandemic now fully unleashed here on the french Riviera.
Tanned, european lotharios in blue shirts, chinos and diamond-studded watches throng the streets, accompanied by women swathed in Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, dripping with ostentatious jewellery and sporting expensively frozen faces.
The superyachts themselves bob in the harbour, which is dominated by the Prince’s Palace, built as a Genoese fortress in 1191 and which today bestows a royal glamour entirely in keeping with the Belle epoque architecture of this billionaire’s playground.
even some of the boats’ names flaunt the owners’ wealth: foie Gras, New era and, for one hard-pressed workaholic, Time Off. This last is a ‘support vessel’ designed purely to carry an owner’s toys around and costs £14 million. Shopping for a new yacht is serious business, with hundreds of millions changing hands in a single transaction — but it’s clear plenty of pleasure goes with the territory.
Here in Monaco, there are liquid lunches galore, with flush-cheeked old-boys backslapping each other and making deals.
for the super-rich, it seems, the pandemic is over — and now it’s time to spend, spend, spend. As the middle classes have seen their living standards freeze or fall, shares and other assets have soared in value during the pandemic — and the biggest beneficiaries have been the rich.
This is the largest and most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world, in a place where one in three residents is a millionaire — not least thanks to the very generous tax laws of this curious principality.
The event is endorsed by no less than Monaco’s ruler, HSH Prince Albert ii of Monaco, who proudly proclaims: ‘i embrace the tight-knit relationship between the Monaco Yacht Show, my government and the yachting industry.’ The event’s unofficial motto could be: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
This year there are more than 100 yachts on display, almost 40 of which are new and making their world debuts for sale here. Most of the 88 motor yachts are ‘superyachts’ more than 24 metres long. Nine are classed as ‘megayachts’, over 80 metres long — as large as a passenger ferry.
As if things couldn’t get any more James Bond, in the harbour i spot the megayacht Quantum Of Solace, which features a cinema room, ‘full beam spa’ and ‘beach club area’, as well as a steam room, ‘chromotherapy Jacuzzi pool’ and ‘massage therapy room’.
She is owned by American John Staluppi, the son of an electrician, who started life as a petrol-station mechanic in Brooklyn before making a huge fortune in car dealerships.
Largest in show this year is iJe, previously owned by Mariah Carey’s ex, the Australian billionaire James Packer, who named the boat using the initials of his three children. At 108 metres, she features a cinema, night club, pool, barber’s salon and lifts to reach her seven decks. During the pandemic, she failed to find a buyer and is now on sale to anyone with £150 million to spare.
Moored beside her in the dock is Kismet (Arabic for ‘fate’), 95 metres and yours for £144 million. Both yachts have had ‘serious offers’.
THe world of yachting is a never-ending game of oneupmanship, and in this year’s designs, outrageous accoutrements and accessories abound. Cloud 9, on sale for £50 million, has a glass-bottomed pool, while Polaris, which is worth some £58 million and which is on display at the show (but not currently for sale), has two waterfalls, including one on the private terrace of the master suite.
in the towering shadow of Artefact, recently crowned Motor Yacht of the Year at the World Superyacht Awards, Monaco Yacht Show spokesman Johan Pizzardini tells me: ‘This is super-yachting. We use superlatives but, generally speaking, yachting is superlative.’
He says that, as the pandemic has begun to wane, a ‘boom market’ has started. The rich, he insists, have reassessed their lives and ‘now want to have fun’.
‘Covid has changed the behaviours of those buying yachts,’ he adds. ‘People want to escape their homes. Now it’s carpe diem. They think: i need to socialise, i want to have fun with my kids, wife, husband, friends, family.’
Once you’ve picked your yacht, you need to decide how to fit it out.
Those who think a superyacht’s toys amount to little more than a pair of jet skis are in for a shock. Today’s playthings are as ambitious as the vessels themselves.
fancy your own submarine? No problem. One company, Sea Magine, builds a model that features military technology and can reach depths of up to 500 metres. ‘One of our clients took this to Tahiti,’ the exhibitor tells me. ‘And on a submersion they spotted a shark. They snapped a photo of it with an iPhone camera through the glass, then asked some scientists which breed it was. it turned out to be a new species.’
The price? A mere £7 million — and one client has bought three of them.
At the Zefhir Helicopter stand, which is showcasing its newest model featuring a ‘ballistic parachute’, an exhibitor tells me she has had ‘around 20 serious offers’ for the chopper, which starts from half a million pounds.
‘We didn’t know what kind of appetite there would be this year, but we were pleasantly surprised,’ she says. ‘People want to have fun now and are ready to spend more money.’
even the yacht show’s on-site Portaloos include videos advertising robotic lavatories, while the humble orange life buoy has been given a high-tech upgrade. Technology company nSpear has two prototypes for an artificially intelligent flying ‘drone life buoy’, which can pull a drowning person to safety.
There are builders, designers, brokers, captains, crew, and, for novice buyers, the show even hosts a special ‘summit’ to offer training into what to look out for — or a guide in how not to waste £100 million in a morning. ‘it’s “seducation,” ’ says Pizzardini. ‘We seduce and we educate them. The main idea is to
know why you need a yacht. If you have a family with kids, it will be different from if you are single and you want to have a party with your friends.
‘Then you need to design it: for example, whether you want a large sun deck or a silent room because you are working and your family is having fun on the other side of the yacht. And do you want to stay in the Mediterranean or explore Antarctica? Everything starts from a blank sheet.’
Once a yacht is ready to be commissioned, the final handshake takes place on board a luxury charter — a comparative snip at £500,000, considering the multi-millions spent on a yacht. The big buyers here are U.S. and Russian nationals, and always are,’ one regular attendee tells me.
‘Some people assume it will be those from the Middle East, or the Greeks, but that’s not the case.
‘As with the fallout of the 2008 financial crash, the Americans and the Russians saved the yachting industry, and now they have saved it again following Covid-19.’ As the sun set yesterday on the world capital of luxury yachting and champagne corks popped long into the night, it was clear that the billionaires’ bankers are going to be busy in the post-pandemic travel boom. For me, though, it’s the easyJet flight home back to reality.
Perhaps the fifth missile of the afternoon arcs over the top of the enclosure. again a miss, but they are getting closer. This one hits the wooden platform upon which the magnificent white lion is dozing in the warm sunshine.
‘hey!’ shouts the stone thrower at the lion. Then to his companions: ‘Is he sleeping? Is he alive? Is he even real?’
Two aspects of this scene strike one as unusual if not shocking in the context of a 21st century zoological gardens. The first is that the helpless lion is being pelted by visitors. The second is that the visiting public are wandering about the zoo armed to the teeth with assault rifles, and even belt-fed light machine guns.
Most of the victorious Taliban foot soldiers who swept into Kabul last month hail from rural provinces, often hundreds of miles away. They have never been to the capital, nor any other city, before. and so, in their downtime – like the soldiers of any other conquering army down the centuries, they have been taking in the sights. some soliders have already been pictured enjoying dodgems and pedalos.
and this weekend Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I spent two days observing and mingling with the Taliban at Kabul zoo.
It was a surreal and sometimes disturbing experience. It also yielded these extraordinary photographs as the fighters eagerly consented to pose as if schoolboys on a day trip. some would have been schoolboys if in Britain, so young were they. here, they had american M4s and M16 rifles rather than lunch boxes slung over their shoulders.
The group we came across were from Uruzgan, a largely tribal, opiumpoppy-growing province next to helmand in the country’s south.
The legendary mujahideen commander ahmad shah Massoud had been known as the ‘Lion of panjshir’. But a real african lion – or any kind of lion – is as foreign to the experience of these Uruzgan backwoodsmen as a blue whale or a kangaroo.
The wolves trotting anxiously round and round in a nearby enclosure seemed to elicit greater respect from them. They knew from experience or by family legend what such creatures can do to livestock or a lonely traveller. There are still about 1,000 roaming wild in afghanistan.
The lion, on the other hand, was a mystery. and a mystery that wasn’t providing value for money.
BehInd the fighters crowded along the fence surrounding its enclosure a zoo official was hopping anxiously from foot to foot. he asked the stone throwers to stop, but was ignored.
‘What can we do?’ he appealed to me. ‘We cannot make them stop. Look at them.’
he meant ‘look at their guns and general demeanour’. he was an educated afghan with Western sensibilities, they were insurgents from the mountains and backwoods who had been fighting for years. This was their time, not his. at least the height of the fence meant that stones could only be lobbed rather than hurled with force.
The lion chose to ignore them. Kabul Zoo has had a chequered history since it opened in 1967. at its height, it displayed more than 400 animals. But the infrastructure – and staff – were devastated in the civil war of the 1990s.
Most of the animals were killed and the plight of those that were left brought international notoriety. The worst cases of that era came to mind while watching the lion endure the stone throwers this weekend.
An asiatic black bear called donatella once had part of her nose sliced off by a Taliban soldier, in revenge for her having scratched him. But the most infamous episode of animal cruelty involved Marjan the lion.
he had been donated by Cologne Zoo in 1978. during the russian occupation and later civil war he became a symbol of the suffering and defiance of the afghan people.
an all too realistic symbol of their suffering. In 1995, a soldier climbed into Marjan’s enclosure to show off to comrades, only to be attacked and killed by the lion. The next day, in retaliation, the dead man’s brother tossed a hand grenade at Marjan. The explosion blinded the lion, also rendering him deaf and toothless.
he became a cause celebre and soldiered on in a pitiful state until the Taliban fell in 2001 and international medical aid was more readily available to him. But by then old age and his injuries had taken too great a toll and he died a few months later.
Today, a bronze statue of Marjan greets visitors just inside the zoo entrance. Admittance is 100 Afghanis (less than £1). We also had to show our Taliban press accreditation.
On a lovely weekend afternoon the zoo was busy – a mix of civilian Kabuli with young children, armed Taliban fighters and groups of stern-faced mullahs in black turbans.
The Taliban leadership has warned foot soldiers to stop taking selfies at such landmarks, particularly with senior officials, as it poses a security risk. This did not stop them when we were there – stared at as two of the few Westerners left in the city.
The zoo is shaded from the sun by mature trees. The animals seemed well-fed, and the infrastructure has been rebuilt with foreign help. Yet the enclosures are small and spartan compared with those in the West.
We saw camels, ostriches, flamingos, pelicans and a crested porcupine. A Taliban fighter giggled in disbelief when I said of the red fox that such creatures climbed my garden wall in London. Two beautiful leopards were asleep on the corrugated roof of a shelter in their shabby enclosure. Earlier in the day in Chicken Street – Kabul’s famed souvenir shopping drag, now empty of customers – we had been offered a ‘tiger’ pelt for $800 (£680). In fact it was a leopard skin. They look so much better on the live animal.
But the star of the zoo was the six-year-old male white lion (which does not have a name). Today there are only a dozen or so examples of this rare type at large in the wild. As a result, they are in great demand with unscrupulous private ‘collectors’.
This lion was one of six adolescents seized by Afghan authorities at the border with Pakistan in 2017. They were found hidden under crates of fruits, being held in ‘deplorable conditions,’ before being smuggled to Pakistan. Now he is fully grown and handsome, treating the gawkers with disdain.
Feeding time was at 4pm: a hunk of red meat swiftly devoured. The Talib fighters were enthralled. One began to climb the fence, to get a better view or even join in, but stopped just short of the razor wire which lines the top. One was reminded of the incident which led to the maiming of Marjan. Will this lion suffer a similar fate?
On the second afternoon we were there, the lion was once more harassed with stones by a group of Taliban fighters from distant Farah, on the Iranian border. Such behaviour seems born out of ignorance rather than malice. The same fighters then gleefully arranged themselves for Jamie, posing with their weaponry before the zoo’s ornamental fountain.
Their delight was clear. The Taliban are in town and no outsider – or animal welfare do-gooder – is going to tell them what to do.