Records indicate that it was chartered by a British Virgin Islands-based company, so it appeared the oligarch would not be using it over the holiday season.
Nevertheless, pictures taken on Christmas Day of that year depict Mr. Abramovich standing on the swim platform at the back of the yacht in the Caribbean sunshine, with Eclipse’s big letter-E emblem behind him.
Such charter documents were part of a ten-year conspiracy to deceive tax officials, which the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have now discovered.
In order to avoid paying millions of euros in VAT on the acquisition and operating costs of the Russian oligarch’s fleet of boats, the plan fraudulently portrayed them as a business leasing enterprise.
