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Matalan billionaire who ran the UK retail empire while 'living' on a yacht in Monaco fights £84m tax bill

By City & Finance Reporter for the Daily Mail

Published: 16:52 EST, 24 November 2016 | Updated: 16:54 EST, 24 November 2016

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John Hargreaves at a Matalan ball with singer Kylie Minogue

He's the other billionaire tax-exile who ran a retail empire in the UK while living on a yacht in Monaco.

Now tycoon John Hargreaves, who founded the Matalan fashion chain, is embroiled in his own run-in with the authorities. 

Hargreaves  is accused of dodging £84million in tax by claiming that he lived in Monaco.

But HM Revenue & Customs believes he spent so much of his time in the UK that money he made from Matalan should be taxed here. Yesterday, Hargreaves, 72, took his fight to a tax tribunal for an initial hearing.

The row dates from May 2001 when Hargreaves and his partner sold shares in Matalan that netted £200million. 

Hargreaves claims his main residence at the time was a luxury hotel suite in Monaco, but Revenue and Customs say he was 'ordinarily resident' in Britain when the deal went through.

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He kept the family home, in Barton, near Preston, and flew back to Britain more than 40 times in the 2000-01 tax year. 

He was then still Matalan's executive chairman and most of his trips were to the HQ in Preston.

But Hargreaves says that when he left the UK, it was his 'settled purpose to live abroad permanently'.

He claims that after a spell in the hotel suite, he and his partner lived on a yacht in the harbour before moving into a rented apartment.

The son of a docks labourer, he went into the retailing business at the age of 16. He resigned as chairman of Matalan in 2007.

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Inside the luxurious world of Monaco - home to Everton's Farhad Moshiri

The ECHO visited the playground of the super rich

• 13:27, 17 MAR 2018

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Private jets, land so expensive they’re making more, and the world’s most famous casino – if you live in Monte Carlo like Everton FC’s Farhad Moshiri, you could live a true life of luxury.

While the ECHO was in Cannes for the Mipim property festival this week, we thought we’d pop along the Riviera to explore one of the world’s smallest countries.

The Principality of Monaco is the second-smallest country in the world, but the most densely-populated.

That’s because it’s known a a playground for the super-rich, home to many thousands of millionaires.

They have included Beatle Ringo Starr, Matalan founder John Hargreaves – and now Mr Moshiri .

So we thought we’d wander round the Monte Carlo area at the heart of the country to see what we could learn about the millionaire lifestyle.

One of the quirks of Monaco is that while its setting is spectacular, it’s actually in parts quite an ordinary-looking and even ugly place.

Because the Principality is so small, developers have to make the best use of every bit of land. So tower blocks have sprouted everywhere, with hundreds of balconies packed with greenery taking advantage of that Mediterranean sun.

There are blocks as ugly as any built in England in the 1960s, though unlike their English equivalents they’ve been very well looked after.

And there are also some rather more impressive 60s models, in modernist styles that have now come back into fashion.

One modern glass-clad skyscraper, glinting in the sun at the far end of Monte Carlo, was visible almost everywhere the ECHO walked.

There’s so little land in Monaco that they’re actually making more. The country is spending some £1.5bn on reclaiming another six hectares of land from the sea below the Monte Carlo casino - the hammering sound of the piling drills echoed through Monte Carlo while the ECHO was there. That land will soon be taken up by more homes for the super-rich.

Monaco is most famous for its Grand Prix. And while normal traffic might not whizz round its winding roads quite as quickly as Formula One cars, it’s still pretty intense and busy, making crossing the roads a bit of a challenge.

But there are some stunning highlights in Monte Carlo too that make the place well worth a visit.

In Monte Carlo sits perhaps the Principality’s most famous landmark, the Casino – a must-visit destination for visitors, whether gamblers or not.

The stunning Beaux-Arts style building, with its domes, statues and palm trees outside, is Monaco’s most famous building. Its a large complex that also houses the Grand Theatre de Monte Carlo.

The cars outside were pretty impressive too, including Rolls Royces and Ferraris.

Inside the halls are dripping with gilt and gold – a lavish environment for the wealthy.

Opposite the temple of gambling is a temporary set of temples to the power of big spending.

Les Pavillions Monte-Carlo consists of five large pebble-shaped buildings, with a sinuous path between them, each containing several luxury stores.

There are two Chanel outlets – one for clothes, one for shoes, as well as stores for brands including Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen.

There are expensive bags, lavish pieces of jewellery, and stunning dresses. There are no prices in the windows, of course – if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

In other places there are prices in the window.

In Monte Carlo we spotted one private jet and helicopter specialist selling a Cessna Citation Mustang business jet for a mere 2.2m euros.

Estate agents’ prices are unsurprisingly high. In on window a two-room seven-floor flat was on sale for 3.3m euros, with another apartment close to the casino with stunning sea views on offer for 5m euros.

And by the waterfront, shops sell boats for hundreds of thousands of euros.

There are plenty of other famous faces reported to be living in Monaco, including Bono and Shirley Bassey.

One sportsman who has really embraced Monaco is Novak Djokovic. He’s opened a vegan restaurant – a relative rarity on the Riviera – in the centre of Monte Carlo.

Eqvita was closed for renovations when the ECHO walked past.

If you fancied something less virtuous to eat, you could head next door to McCarthy’s pub and restaurant, where you can get finger food like French Fries – 9 euros a portion.

There’s also fish and chips with mushy peas – 23 euros - and at weekends you can get a Full English Breakfast for 16 euros.

We focused on Monte Carlo on this visit but there’s more to Monaco, including the Old Town with its Princes’ Palace that was once home to Grace Kelly, and the Stade Louis II – itself built on reclaimed land.

It may be a pleasant place to live – but not a cheap one.

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Former market stall seller who founded Matalan set for £250m windfall 

By Rupert Steiner for the Daily Mail Updated: 05:03 EDT, 2 April 2010

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Windfall: Matalan founder John Hargreaves has struck a deal with investors for the chain of stores

He is a former barrow boy who has turned rags into riches and is now set for a £250m windfall.

John Hargreaves, boss of discount fashion chain Matalan, will take home the eye-watering dividend after striking a deal with investors to raise £525m.

The 66-year-old who left school at 14 is credited with starting the low cost retailing revolution which saw Primark and New Look follow in his footsteps.

He opened his first Matalan in Preston in 1985 and the remaining half of the money will be pumped back into the business and will go towards re-financing existing loans and expansion.

Hargreaves’ bumper dividend is one of the biggest for a retailer and will be shared with his children, Jamie, Jason and Maxine who are all involved with the firm.

The Monaco-based tax exile, who owns a 200-ft super-yacht called My Lady Christina, and a Dassault Falcon jet, declined to give details of how he plans to spend his fortune.

Hargreaves already has a holiday home in Barbados where the family spend every Christmas.

But the life of luxury he enjoys today is a far cry from his humble beginnings.

Born in Everton close to the docks where his father worked as a labourer he left school at 14 and worked on a traditional market stall selling seconds from Marks & Spencer at a huge discount.

This is where his taste for piling them high and selling them cheap.

By the age of 20 he had started a chain of fashion stores called Jaymax after his two eldest children.

But it wasn’t until the 1980s on a trip to America that he stumbled across the idea that would eventually make him a multi-millionaire.

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Discount clubs were springing up in out of town warehouse sites in San Diego.

Customers paid a dollar to join to register their details and were sold discounted shirts and trousers. It was the start of retailers collecting data about their customers which meant shopkeepers were able to target their marketing to their customers.

Retailing revolution: Mr Hargreaves opened the first Matalan in 1985, paving the way for other discount stores like Primark

The business, now run by chief executive Alistair McGeorge, has ridden out the downturn with its cut price clothes, homewares and eye-catching advertising campaigns which have included TV presenter Melanie Sykes.

It has announced plans for a major expansion programme which could see as many as 100 new stores opening in the next few years to add to the 205 already in place.

Hargreaves had been trying to sell the business for £1.5bn and settled for the financing after failing to find a private equity firms prepared to stump up the amount.

Star attraction: An advertising campaign with Melanie Sykes helped Matalan survive the economic downturn

McGeorge said: ‘Following three years of improved trading and results, which has been accompanied by a rapid pay down of debt, we are pleased to have completed a re-financing which will underpin our growth for many years to come as we execute our growth strategy as an independent company.’

Just ten years ago Hargreaves took £232m out of the business after floating it on the stock market.

The business has had a bumpy ride over the past decade having successfully listed on the stock market and soared in value it failed to see the threat of competition from the likes of Tesco and Primark and went through a rough patch. But in recent years chief executive Alistair McGeorge has been busy getting it back on a stable footing.

Hargreaves was approached in November by bankers who said they had two interested parties who wanted to buy the business.

The retail boss was not looking to sell but was interested to see how much they were willing to pay.

After holding discussions over a number of months he called the sale off after failing to agree on price.

In a statement Matalan said: ‘The proceeds of the capital raise will be used to refinance the company’s existing debt facilities and to finance a distribution to shareholders.’

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The Drapers Interview: The man behind Matalan

In the year Matalan turns 30, founder John Hargreaves has this week received the Drapers Lifetime Achievement Award. In his first ever interview, the self-confessed workaholic, who built up his fashion empire from scratch, explains how he’s always been a value man.

By Tara Hounslea 26 November 2015

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The man behind Matalan

John Hargreaves: ”I always loved trading since being a kid. I loved buying something and selling it, whatever it was.”

“I don’t know anything about business; I’ve just learnt as I’ve gone along. But I’ve always had good people around me and I think that is critical,” says Matalan’s publicity-shy founder John Hargreaves.

Born in 1944 as the middle child of eight, who all shared one bedroom in a terraced house in inner-city Liverpool, Hargreaves “never dreamt for one second” that he’d be where he is today. His Matalan business has developed into a portfolio of more than 220 UK stores and 21 overseas franchise stores, employing more than 16,000 staff.

This year’s Sunday Times Rich List estimates he is worth around £1bn and places him at number 108, but the Monaco resident readily admits: “I’ve always been a value guy.”

“I used to go up and down [Liverpool’s Great Homer Street] market and compare what people were selling; I’d always undercut them because I’d rather sell a lot at a little than a few with a big margin,” he explains in a soft Scouse accent while sat in a grand showroom at 31 Old Burlington Street in Mayfair, home to men’s heritage brand Wolsey, which is run by his son Jamey.

However, while one former executive describes him as “a great retailer with great retail instinct” and refers to his yacht and plane, he adds “He is not a flash man. He’s very down to earth”, which is how he appears.

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Having left school at the age of 14 with hopes of joining the Merchant Navy, jealous of friends returning from the distant shores of New York with exotic boxer shorts, belts and records, he stumbled into the fashion industry by chance. Needing to find a job, he gained his first position at a clothing wholesaler called Stoops & Co in Islington, Liverpool, as “the boy” unpacking parcels on the day he turned 15.

“I loved clothes, but I knew nothing about them,” he remembers. “I was very much into fashion at that stage. We were Mods, Teds, everything.”

He showed promise with a knack for recalling the product prices as he unpacked, as well as where he’d put them and where they came from. At 16, he was sent out selling to shops, giving him a taste for life as a trader.

He married young, at 19, and was making good money from commission. However, aspiring to more, he saved £45 to buy a reel of fabric that he made into A-line dresses, which he sold at Great Homer Street Market. Netting £13 in one Saturday afternoon, more than his week’s salary of £11, spurred him on to save a further £50 to buy an old van. He gave up his job for the markets in 1964, aged 20.

“I always loved trading since being a kid; I loved buying something and selling it, whatever it was,” he says, explaining that he became a regular on markets around Liverpool before expanding as far as Pwllheli in northwest Wales, employing his younger brother Frank and older brother Billy.

I always loved trading since being a kid; I loved buying something and selling it, whatever it was

After too many cold early morning starts, Hargreaves decided there was an easier way to make money. He opened his first Jaymax store in 1976 , named after his sons Jason and Jamey and daughter Maxine, and selling seconds from high street chains like Marks & Spencer.

As others cottoned on to buying high street seconds, and to ensure a constant supply of stock, Hargreaves decided to start sourcing new product directly from the Far East a couple of years later for his growing network of stores, as well as supplying other market traders and small shops.

“I thought: ’If the importers can do it, I can do it’,” he says, recalling buying trips to Hong Kong where he visited huge buildings in Kowloon that sold chickens on one floor and knitwear on another.

“I’ve heard all kinds of stories about people getting containers of sawdust, but we never had anything like that. We must have been very lucky,” he acknowledges.

By the mid-1980s, he had grown the Jaymax chain to a portfolio of 35 stores with a turnover of £10m, alongside a significant wholesale business supplying market traders and small stores.

However, it was while visiting friends in Los Angeles that he got the idea that would transform his life for good. Visiting Price Club with his hairdresser friend to buy goods for his salon, Hargreaves immediately spotted the potential for the members-only discount warehouse format in the UK, a precursor to big-name discount clubs such as Costco and Sam’s Club.

On his return, he created a separate space in his Preston warehouse to offer product at 20% more than his wholesale prices but 25% cheaper than his store prices through a members-club format to avoid the need for retail planning permission. He bought a ready-made shelf company and in May 1985 Matalan Discount Club (Cash and Carry) was born.

“There’s no meaning to the name Matalan whatsoever,” he says, quipping that if he had a pound for everyone who’d asked him what it stood for, he’d be a very rich man indeed. “I’ve been told that it’s my two sons Matt and Alan, but it’s definitely not.”

The Preston warehouse was located just off the M6 motorway near Bamber Bridge to service the Jaymax stores, which Hargreaves began closing down to transition into Matalan. Due to its out-of-town location, though, it got no passing trade.

“I had a bright idea that I’d approach the HR manager at [nearby automotive manufacturer] British Leyland to ask if I could bring some stuff into the canteen at lunchtime and show them the prices. If they liked it, they could become a member of Matalan discount club and buy product at discount prices,” he says.

He then approached another local company, British Telecom, to do the same. Within weeks, he says, “we had something like 8,000 to 10,000 members”, heralding the start of the pioneering Matalan database that today boasts almost 12 million members and covers almost 70% of UK households.

Matalan grew rapidly and by 1995 it had 55 stores. Hargreaves was then approached by retail conglomerate Kingfisher to buy the business. A deal was almost done but fell through at the final hurdle, which Hargreaves now views as a lucky escape as “we would have sold for £220m”.

He appointed former Dorothy Perkins, Debenhams and Kingfisher executive Angus Monro as chief executive in 1996 and became chairman of the board. In 1997 the company moved its headquarters to Skelmersdale, Lancashire, and a year later he set his sights on a stock market flotation.

“I was a very ambitious kid. I always felt that if you’re having one, you may as well have two – and if you’re having two, why don’t you have four?” he recalls. “Numbers didn’t mean nothing to me. I was always looking for how to evolve it to the next stage.”

At this point, Hargreaves was working seven days a week, visiting stores or looking for new locations at weekends and making four annual three-week sourcing trips to “wherever the prices were right”, taking in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Hong Kong and China.

I’m probably a workaholic really, and it does take you a bit of time to ease off

His first “pinch-me” moment was listing 23.5 million shares on the London Stock Exchange in May 1998.

However, he was quickly back to the day job. By 2000 he decided to re-evaluate his life, selling a portion of his 69% stake in the business and moving to Monaco, where he still lives.

“I was a very wealthy man on paper, but I actually didn’t have any great wealth because I was pumping everything back in [to Matalan], so I decided to sell some shares and move,” he says.

“I’m probably a workaholic really, and it does take you a bit of time to ease off. When I first went to Monaco, I didn’t know what to do with myself and I was driving people mad. I was never off the phone.”

He pulled back from the business and became chairman, cutting his role down to a couple of days a week. However, over the next four or five years he started to feel he didn’t like the way the business was going so made an approach to buy it back.

“I felt they were losing the advantage of what we were: the leader in the value sector. They were all about margins and pushing prices up, so in 2005 I approached the board of directors and said I’d be interested in buying the business back because the share price was dropping.”

He successfully took the company private again a year later, in an £827m deal backed by £410m of debt, installed a management team and backed off again.

All three of his children were schooled in the business, but only Jason remained at this stage, having worked at Matalan in various roles since he was 16.

Today, Jason is the only child to have remained in the value sector, like his father, as managing director of Matalan. His other son, Jamey, runs Wolsey, Morley and denim label Blk Dnm and ownes 50% of Julien Macdonald, while his daughter, Maxine, runs and owns Nicole Farhi and Fenn Wright Manson, and has an investment in mid-market womenswear brand Damsel in a Dress.

Hargreaves admits that he is a hard taskmaster, particularly with his children: “You say things to your children that you couldn’t say to your employees because you expect a lot more of them; I think a lot of fathers are like that.”

Retail analyst Nick Bubb met Hargreaves on occasion when the company was public during analyst briefings, describing him as “appearing quite shy but a straightforward bloke”, who was keen to promote his kids.

Jason was appointed to the role of managing director at Matalan in 2013, after chief executive Darren Blackhurst stepped down.

Hargreaves describes Matalan’s recent venture onto the high street, which culminated in the opening of a store on London’s Oxford Street in June, as a “work in progress, with a lot to do on the model”, but says he’s happy with progress so far. The retailer is also building its own web platform and by next year he says it will be an “all-singing, all-dancing platform, which will be the best in kind”.

“On an international level, it will allow us to test countries like France, Spain, Germany and Italy to see where the most promising response comes from, and then from that we’ll assess if it is worth a bricks-and-mortar there,” he says.

In July, Matalan also launched an online company called Matalan Direct, offering big-ticket items such as bedroom, bathroom and living room furniture and appliances. Next year, there are plans to launch around five bricks-and-mortar stores offering the new fuller range, all decked out with Matalan products.

Matalan’s sales fell by 2.5% to £1.1bn in the year ending February 28, while EBITDA rose 5.1% to £100.3m as the business encountered problems caused by moving to a new distribution centre, which has since improved.

Hargreaves has stepped back from the business almost entirely, but he is always happy to give an opinion when it is asked for.

“It would be fair to say I do have my opinions,” he laughs. “I’m very much into value – that’s what our customers want. Delivering value and customer satisfaction is high on my agenda. I keep saying that if you get the right product for your customer, they will buy it.”

The drive that always pushed him to go one step further doesn’t seem to have waned much in his later years. Now he spends his mornings keeping fit and playing golf (badly, he says), but in the afternoons he’s back at his desk in his office in Monaco.

He describes himself as a “big investor across a number of sectors”, as well as being active in various charity projects, namely the NSPCC and Alder Hey children’s hospital in his hometown of Liverpool.

The family is notoriously low profile – he won’t be pushed to talk about his wife, who he says has always been in the background – but he does disclose that, as a family and as Matalan, they are the single biggest donor to the NSPCC in the country. Matalan’s Alphabet Scarves campaign for Christmas 2014 raised £650,000 for Alder Hey and the new Beanie Vs Bobble collection of hats for autumn 15 aims to raise even more.

Hargreaves is clearly a private man but charming if you get the chance to meet him. And he has no regrets. “I’ve always been one of those who thinks you can’t alter the past – I’m all about the future,” he says, before being led to his first press photoshoot in 71 years, which is naturally hasty at his request.

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “ A SUPERYACHT IS A TERRIBLE ASSET ,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

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In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include IMAX theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that!  ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

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The Filipino fishermen staring down Xi’s ships in the South China Sea

For all his career as a fisherman, Miguel Betana has been trawling the waters of the Scarborough Shoal, a triangular patch of reefs and rocks and turquoise waters in the South China Sea. On his latest trip that all came to a halt. This time, his way was blocked by a row of seven Chinese fishing... For all his career as a fisherman, Miguel Betana has been trawling the waters of the Scarborough Shoal, a triangular patch of reefs and rocks and turquoise waters in the South China Sea. On his latest trip that all came to a halt. This time, his way was blocked by a row of seven Chinese fishing... For all his career as a fisherman, Miguel Betana has been trawling the waters of the Scarborough Shoal, a triangular patch of...

Fear on streets as Israelis brace for Iranian attack

Israel has mobilised the full force of its military and called up reservists on leave as it braces for an attack by Iran. Crowds headed for supermarkets to stock up on bottled water and canned goods, fearing they would be sent to public shelters or safe rooms, and long queues formed at petrol stations. Expectations of an escalation in the... Israel has mobilised the full force of its military and called up reservists on leave as it braces for an attack by Iran. Crowds headed for supermarkets to stock up on bottled water and canned goods, fearing they would be sent to public shelters or safe rooms, and long queues formed at petrol stations. Expectations of an escalation in the... Israel has mobilised the full force of its military and called up reservists on leave as it braces for an attack by Iran.

Israeli military ‘hunted down’ my son, says father of aid worker

The father of Jacob Flickinger, a US-Canadian aid worker who was killed when a missile hit his humanitarian convoy in Gaza, has called on President Biden to suspend military support to Israel. John Flickinger said his son had been “chased and hunted down” by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) after delivering aid to a... The father of Jacob Flickinger, a US-Canadian aid worker who was killed when a missile hit his... The father of Jacob Flickinger, a US-Canadian aid worker who was killed when a missile hit his...

Hollande revs up for comeback 10 years after l’affaire du scooter

war in UKRAINE

Cost of Putin’s war in Ukraine is half a million disabled Russians

Russia cosies up to the Taliban as it seeks anti-western allies

World’s oldest man dies aged 112 — after two days as record holder

Man held in Qatar date app ‘sting’ runs out of HIV drug

Thousands of day trippers pay €5 to enter Venice

Shut-down university building could be linked to 150 cancer cases

Portugal’s new PM reinstates ‘imperial’ heraldry as his first act

Gilbert of Hastings would be pleased. The Englishman, who became the first bishop of Lisbon after his countrymen... Gilbert of Hastings would be pleased. The Englishman, who became the first bishop of Lisbon after... Gilbert of Hastings would be pleased. The Englishman, who became the first bishop of Lisbon after...

‘Momentous’ micro-galaxy discovery could unlock mystery of dark matter

Astronomers have discovered a micro-galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, a tiny system of 60 ancient stars hailed as a... Astronomers have discovered a micro-galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, a tiny system of 60 ancient... Astronomers have discovered a micro-galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, a tiny system of 60 ancient...

British couple stranded after yacht bought with life savings is hit by lightning

A retired couple who spent their life savings on a yacht are stranded in the Bahamas after it was struck by lightning. Mike Beech, 63, and his wife Helen, 61, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, were moored off a small island near George Town when a... A retired couple who spent their life savings on a yacht are stranded in the Bahamas after it was... A retired couple who spent their life savings on a yacht are stranded in the Bahamas after it was...

Granny Wang, the Chinese Cilla Black, takes theme park by storm

Thieves make off with $30m from vault without triggering alarms

Win for Silicon Valley billionaires behind secretive utopian city

South Africa’s former speaker surrenders to police in corruption case

Us election.

Judge rejects Trump’s attempt to dismiss classified records case

Boost for Biden as No Labels abandons campaign

Biden losing in six of seven swing states, says poll

Gerard Baker

Trump’s running-mate could be 2028 favourite

Family of murdered woman deny Trump’s claim he spoke to them

Starmer knows he must deliver on migration.

Patrick Maguire

Labour is watching the fate of governments that can’t control borders and is set to go toe to toe with Sunak on the issue

Emma DUncan

I fear Labour has much to learn about schools

Martin Samuel | Notebook

Tech ‘update’ leaves me trailing like Hamilton

Robert Buckland

Autistic people are paying high price for social care crisis

Leading Articles

Unfriendly Fire

The Israeli strike on an aid convoy in Gaza has caused deep concern among its allies. The military must ensure that vital humanitarian aid gets through safely

Disruptive Influence

The NEU’s obstructive political agenda ill serves students and teachers

Blessed Are The Cheesemakers

New duties on EU deli imports may boost sales of British produce

letters to the editor

The motherhood trap and the cost of childcare

Sir, As a young GP with four small children I was pushed to continue working more hours than I wanted by my assertive husband and unsympathetic partners at work. (“ I’m a working mother. I earn over £100k. Why should I pay your nursery fees ?”... Sir, As a young GP with four small children I was pushed to continue working more hours than I... Sir, As a young GP with four small children I was pushed to continue working more hours than I...

Daily Universal Register

UK : Commons environment, food and rural affairs committee releases a report on pet welfare and abuse; train drivers working for Avanti West Coast, West Midlands Trains, East Midlands Trains and CrossCountry who are members of the Aslef union go on strike for 24 hours in an ongoing dispute over pay; National Education Union convenes in Bournemouth for annual conference; monthly Halifax House Price Index published; first class County Championship cricket season in England and Wales begins as Lancashire host Surrey.

On this day

In 1722 Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch explorer, became the first-recorded European visitor to Easter Island, which he named Paasch-Eyland. Of the statues he noted that “these stone figures caused us to be filled with wonder” as to how the natives “had been able to erect them”; in 1755 the sale of Montagu House in Bloomsbury, London, was completed — the first building to house the British Museum’s collection. The gardens opened to the public in 1757, the house and collections on January 15, 1759; in 1843 the formation of the “colony of Hong Kong” was confirmed in Letters Patent promulgated by Queen Victoria. The first governor was Sir Henry Pottinger, in office until May 8, 1844; in 1895 , after his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry had collapsed, Oscar Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in London on charges of gross indecency; in 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death in the US for passing atomic secrets to Russia. They were executed on June 19, 1953 by electric chair.

Nature notes

The male starling was doing all he could to attract a possible mate. Perched on the chimney pot, he was going through his full repertoire of beak clicks and mimicry — car alarms, curlew calls, thrushes singing and winter winds whining through the drainpipes. The bird’s nuptial plumage was an eye-catching brilliance of glossy green; his beak was dandelion yellow with a delicate blue patch at its base. Suddenly a female flew on to the roof. Grabbing a handy twig, the male began twirling it around extravagantly like a cheerleader with a baton. This prop was advertising the fact that he had started building a nest in a nearby cavity, and that the female could go in and finish it, if she so desired. Jonathan Tulloch

Jonathan Tulloch

Birthdays today

Marc Allera , chief executive, BT Group’s consumer brands (BT, EE and Plusnet), 52; Andrea Arnold , film-maker, Wasp (2003), 63; Jane Asher , actress, Alfie (1966), 78; Professor John Carey , English literature scholar, author, 80 Great Books from a Lifetime of Reviews (2022), 90; Allan Clarke , singer-songwriter, founding member of the Hollies, 82; Roger Corman , film director, the Edgar Allan Poe film series (1959-64), 98; Mary Costa , the voice of Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty (1959), 94; Stella Creasy , Labour MP for Walthamstow, 47; Russell Davies , writer and broadcaster, quizmaster of Brain of Britain (BBC Radio 4), 78; Alex Davies-Jones , Labour MP for Pontypridd, shadow tech and digital economy minister, 35; Julius Drake , pianist, 65; Agnetha Faltskog , singer, Abba, Waterloo (1974), 74; Vicky Featherstone , artistic director, Royal Court Theatre, London (2013-23), 57; Elena Ferrante , novelist, the Neapolitan Novels (2011-14), 81; Freddie Fox , actor, Pride (2014), 35; Peter Greenaway , film director, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), 82; Krishnan Guru-Murthy , presenter, Channel 4 News, 54; Victoria Hamilton , actress, The Crown (2016-17), 53; Anthony Horowitz , author, the Alex Rider series, 69; Lily James , actress, Downton Abbey (2012-15), Cinderella (2015), 35; Marcus Jones , Tory MP for Nuneaton, deputy chief whip, 50; Afzal Khan , Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton, 66; Dame Suzi Leather , chairwoman, Alzheimer’s Society, 68; The Most Rev Bernard Longley , RC Archbishop of Birmingham, 69; Caitlin Moran , Times journalist, How to Build a Girl (2014), and broadcaster, 49; Jennifer Penney , former senior principal of the Royal Ballet, 78; Virendra Sharma , Labour MP for Ealing, Southall, 77; Henrik Stenson , golfer, winner of the Open (2016), 48; Jane Thynne , novelist, Solitaire (2016), 63; Eben Upton , pioneer of the Raspberry Pi bare-bones computer, 46; Pharrell Williams , rapper and producer, G I R L (2014), 51.

Retailers suffer worst run since Covid

In store and online sales down for six months

Retail sales have been falling for six months, having dropped again in March, the longest streak outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a survey. Total in-store and online sales fell by 2.2 per cent last month, the sixth month in a row that retail sales had fallen, the survey by BDO, a... Retail sales have been falling for six months, having dropped again in March, the longest streak outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a survey. Total in-store and online sales fell by 2.2 per cent last month, the sixth month in a row that retail sales had fallen, the survey by BDO, a... Retail sales have been falling for six months, having dropped again in March, the longest streak outside of the Covid-19...

Thames Water owes millions to Chinese state-backed banks

Two Chinese state-owned banks have emerged as central players in the financial crisis engulfing Thames Water. Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China are among a group of lenders that are behind a £190 million loan taken out by Kemble Water Finance, the parent company of Britain’s largest water supplier. This loan is due... Two Chinese state-owned banks have emerged as central players in the financial crisis engulfing Thames Water. Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China are among a group of lenders that are behind a £190 million loan taken out by Kemble Water Finance, the parent company of Britain’s largest water supplier. This loan is due... Two Chinese state-owned banks have emerged as central players in the financial crisis engulfing Thames Water. Bank of China and...

UK investors cash in on Wall Street bull run

The London stock market is suffering from “a relentless narrative of gloom” and British investors are eschewing UK stocks in favour of companies listed in the US, according to the data specialist Calastone. Investors withdrew a net £823 million from UK funds in March, the highest since February last year. It marked... The London stock market is suffering from “a relentless narrative of gloom” and British investors... The London stock market is suffering from “a relentless narrative of gloom” and British investors...

Music industry raises tempo in battle against AI

Housing market springs into life over Easter

Former Accenture executive sues consultants for unfair dismissal

business commentary

For Vodafone and Three, less can be more

Sometimes it can be hard to spot what regulators call the “prospect of a substantial lessening of competition”. Not... Sometimes it can be hard to spot what regulators call the “prospect of a substantial lessening of... Sometimes it can be hard to spot what regulators call the “prospect of a substantial lessening of...

I’m not a columnist any more, think of me as your words and ideas architect

What is the best paid job title in the UK? It is an architect, according to a detailed survey of salaries that came... What is the best paid job title in the UK? It is an architect, according to a detailed survey of... What is the best paid job title in the UK? It is an architect, according to a detailed survey of...

UK house prices fall in March, says Halifax

Vodafone-Three merger faces in-depth competition investigation

Abrdn shareholders urged to reject pay report over finance chief’s salary

Former spurs owner avoids prison in insider trading case.

The British billionaire Joe Lewis has avoided a prison sentence in the United States for insider trading after a judge concluded that his age, ill health and sense of remorse argued for more lenient treatment. Lewis, 87, the former owner of... The British billionaire Joe Lewis has avoided a prison sentence in the United States for insider... The British billionaire Joe Lewis has avoided a prison sentence in the United States for insider...

Carpetright drafts in advisers to lay out cost-cutting measures

Co-op denies mutual model is broken after profits slump

Disney’s rollercoaster is back on track

Walt Disney has been out of market favour for several years now, with its share price struggling because of the... Walt Disney has been out of market favour for several years now, with its share price struggling... Walt Disney has been out of market favour for several years now, with its share price struggling...

market report

Metal miners digging the boom in copper and gold

The FTSE 100 was propelled upwards again on Thursday by its mining constituents, which rose on the back of booming... The FTSE 100 was propelled upwards again on Thursday by its mining constituents, which rose on... The FTSE 100 was propelled upwards again on Thursday by its mining constituents, which rose on...

WANdisco turnaround is like the task of Sisyphus, laments chief

The chief executive of Cirata has compared the difficulties of turning the troubled software company around to “the laborious task of Sisyphus” as sales dropped and losses widened last year. Cirata, a data software specialist formerly known as... The chief executive of Cirata has compared the difficulties of turning the troubled software... The chief executive of Cirata has compared the difficulties of turning the troubled software...

Wage growth slowdown could mean interest rate cuts this summer

Mondi granted more time for DS Smith bid as rival shows its hand

US deal could push up price of HRT, warns British watchdog

need to know

Your three-minute digest

The Times Enterprise Network

Providing inspiration and advice for entrepreneurs on how to run and grow their businesses

young founders

Why it’s not too early for GenZ to get the entrepreneurial bug

The generation game: how to benefit from the talents of all ages

How to build a business when you’re barely old enough to work

Never mind the side hustle — these Gen Zers are the real deal

expert tips

How will the new flexible working rules affect us?

recruitment

Offering a fair crack at a career in finance

Financial services accounts for 12 per cent of UK GDP and provides 2.5 million jobs, yet remains one of the nation’s most unequal industries. At every measure of diversity, from socioeconomic background to ethnicity and gender, top jobs and higher pay are still heavily weighted towards professional-class white men. A “Who gets ahead and how” report from the City of... Financial services accounts for 12 per cent of UK GDP and provides 2.5 million jobs, yet remains... Financial services accounts for 12 per cent of UK GDP and provides 2.5 million jobs, yet remains...

RECRUITMENT: SIX FROM THE BEST

Celebrate differences in your team and reflect your customer base

At just 33, Sheeraz Gulsher has already spent a decade pushing for inclusive workplaces. He is co-founder of the... At just 33, Sheeraz Gulsher has already spent a decade pushing for inclusive workplaces. He is co-founder of the non-profit People Like Us, which campaigns for legislation on ethnicity pay-gap reporting, and also runs BraverTalent.com, helping the media and marketing industry to become more diverse. Here are his... At just 33, Sheeraz Gulsher has already spent a decade pushing for inclusive workplaces. He is co-founder of the non-profit...

When eight additional minutes was signalled here at Stamford Bridge there was hardly a roar of hope from the Chelsea fans. Maybe they were simply temporarily hoarse from booing the ­returning Mason Mount. Maybe they were numb from the rain and the sight of their team trailing after leading 2-0. All the old doubts flooded back: about the team’s backbone, about the lack... When eight additional minutes was signalled here at Stamford Bridge there was hardly a roar of... When eight additional minutes was signalled here at Stamford Bridge there was hardly a roar of...

• Ten Hag: We dominated but failed to do our jobs

premier league | paul joyce

Mac Allister rocket helps anxious Liverpool over line

After the angst came the acclaim. There had been a spell in the second half when anxiety filled Anfield, dreams were... After the angst came the acclaim. There had been a spell in the second half when anxiety filled Anfield, dreams were in danger of being dashed and it appeared Jürgen Klopp would be left cursing his ability to call things correctly. The Liverpool manager warned on the eve of Sheffield United’s visit that this would... After the angst came the acclaim. There had been a spell in the second half when anxiety filled Anfield, dreams were in danger...

football | paul hawkins interview

Hawk-Eye founder: I’m least proud of VAR – but this is how to fix it

Vingegaard and Evenepoel suffer broken collarbones in crash

county championship | mike atherton

Opener who made 441 and another Ollie Robinson – my county XI to watch

matt dickinson

No Hand of God, a clean Armstrong: sport’s great ‘what if’ moments

champions Cup | will kelleher

‘We don’t fear you any more’ – can anyone restore English aura in Europe?

cycling | David Bates

Fatigue and team-mate are greatest threats to Van der Poel at Paris-Roubaix

Lyon: I’ll help Hartley be a spin king in Australia

There is one thing that Nathan Lyon wishes to get straight, having recently arrived at Emirates Old Trafford for a... There is one thing that Nathan Lyon wishes to get straight, having recently arrived at Emirates... There is one thing that Nathan Lyon wishes to get straight, having recently arrived at Emirates...

rugby union | stuart barnes

Russell-inspired thumping is on cards if callow Exeter don’t fix indiscipline

‘It feels at the moment like it’s going to take a really good side to really put us down, particularly at Sandy... ‘It feels at the moment like it’s going to take a really good side to really put us down... ‘It feels at the moment like it’s going to take a really good side to really put us down...

Premier League to keep points deductions for major spending breaches

bill edgar’s premier league quiz

Who is the only player to start every game since beginning of last season?

Nadal: My body won’t allow me to play Monte-Carlo Masters

Bill Edgar’s Deep Dive

Top flight’s three-team title races – and how they played out

Two plans to save county championship – but which side are you on.

As he begins his final season in charge of Surrey, Alec Stewart has mounted a passionate defence of the County Championship, particularly arguing that the number of matches should not be cut. The question of how the domestic schedule should look has split opinion, with the Professional Cricketers’ Association and some players raising concerns about the volume of matches... As he begins his final season in charge of Surrey, Alec Stewart has mounted a passionate defence... As he begins his final season in charge of Surrey, Alec Stewart has mounted a passionate defence...

• Young talent, Lyon and Elgar arrive, and can Surrey set title record?

New £35m fund for cricket domes to help inspire next generation

Rishi Sunak has announced £35 million of government funding for grassroots facilities in England and Wales which will... Rishi Sunak has announced £35 million of government funding for grassroots facilities in England and Wales which will contribute towards the building of 16 new cricket domes in towns and cities across the country. The new domes will be built in the locations that are hosting matches for the Women’s T20 World Cup in... Rishi Sunak has announced £35 million of government funding for grassroots facilities in England and Wales which will...

We must set an example, warns Wiegman after Hayes-Eidevall clash

WTA defies legends by striking £55m Saudi deal

Norris: Alonso penalty for Russell crash was wrong – rules are unclear now

Watch: Mass brawl breaks out two seconds into NHL match

Rugby union | Matt Cotton

Dupont and Ntamack return – and why Saracens can upset Bordeaux

The European Champions Cup (and Challenge Cup) are back. Over the next fortnight, 16 teams — nine of whom are former tournament winners — will condense into the final four as we thrash out the round-of-16 and quarter-final stages of Europe’s elite competition. We are only 52 days away from the Champions Cup final at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with the Challenge Cup... The European Champions Cup (and Challenge Cup) are back. Over the next fortnight, 16 teams — nine... The European Champions Cup (and Challenge Cup) are back. Over the next fortnight, 16 teams — nine...

Rob Wright’s tips and news

FRIDAY TIPS Bet of the day Louisiana Bay (2.00 Lingfield Park) This lightly-raced mare has improved since stepped up... FRIDAY TIPS Bet of the day Louisiana Bay (2.00 Lingfield Park) This lightly-raced mare has improved since stepped up to middle-distances and she can claim a second success here. Her only previous win came over a mile-and-three-quarters at Southwell last month but she only just lasted home there and this... FRIDAY TIPS Bet of the day Louisiana Bay (2.00 Lingfield Park) This lightly-raced mare has improved since stepped up...

Ahead of the biopic Back to Black, Sean O’Neill investigates how her father and ex-husband grappled with the legacy of her death

FILM review

Scoop’s version of Prince Andrew’s downfall is a media love-in

The Newsnight interview that brought down the Duke of York has been turned into an enjoyable romp by Netflix

Netflix has made a drama out of the crisis that sealed the Duke of York’s fate. From Emily Maitlis’ whippet to the depiction of Andrew — what does it gloss over?

How I persuaded Prince Andrew to do that car-crash interview

When the Duke of York appeared on Newsnight, Emily Maitlis’s interview made global headlines. But it was the show’s ‘booker extraordinaire’, Sam McAlister, who made it happen

THE ARTS COLUMN

Are soap operas dying? We want banter, not serial killers

With audiences for soaps in freefall, one Corrie addict says writers should go back to the tittle-tattle which charmed so many viewers

CAITLIN MORAN’S CELEBRITY WATCH

A no-choc Bake Off makes Britain look flat-ass broke and not at all sexy

Robin Williams — a life too big for ten pictures to capture

album review

Vampire Weekend love being millennials in middle age

Yard Act’s frontman — why we need to silence the AI music bots

Why godzilla is the true king of movie monsters.

What’s that stirring in the depths of the ocean? It’s grey and scaly with glowing eyes, it’s very, very big — and it’s making a noise that sounds like “skreeonk”. Godzilla, undisputed king of the monsters, is back, smashing up ancient landmarks... What’s that stirring in the depths of the ocean? It’s grey and scaly with glowing eyes, it’s very... What’s that stirring in the depths of the ocean? It’s grey and scaly with glowing eyes, it’s very...

Film reviews

Film review

The First Omen is like Call the Midwife directed by Satan

Damien’s origins are traced in this new horror, with Bill Nighy, Charles Dance and Game of Thrones star Nell Tiger Free

FILM REVIEW

Evil Does Not Exist: something nasty in the Japanese woods

The arthouse darling Ryusuke Hamaguchi is at his most artful in this elusive drama about rural gentrification

film review

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is an audacious action flick

Set on the neon-soaked night-time streets of a fictional Indian city, the actor’s directorial debut is startling in execution and ambition

The Trouble with Jessica is a north London satire full of zingers

Rufus Sewell, Indira Varma and Olivia Williams teeter enjoyably between drama and comedy

A stunning and horrifying drama by the director of Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone’s movie follows a hellish odyssey undertaken by two teens travelling from Senegal

first person

What really happened in Prince Andrew’s interview — and the part I played

In my 36 years as a photographer, I’ve shot hundreds of celebrities, everyone from Sir Tony Blair to Kate Moss and Sir David Attenborough. I once turned up at Abbey Road Studios for a shoot without knowing whom I was photographing. Suddenly I was... In my 36 years as a photographer, I’ve shot hundreds of celebrities, everyone from Sir Tony Blair... In my 36 years as a photographer, I’ve shot hundreds of celebrities, everyone from Sir Tony Blair...

CLASSIC FILM OF THE WEEK

On the Waterfront (1954) — Brando’s role of a lifetime

MUSIC REVIEWS

The best new music to listen to this week — Lorde is back

first night | classical

A period orchestra shows us how to reinvent Sibelius

Reader’s recipe: hummus with lamb

The style set’s high street spring buys (it’s not prada, it’s zara).

A Zara blazer, a pair of Jigsaw trousers and a perfect cocktail outfit from Mango. The British style set might start thinking about their spring wardrobes while sitting front row at designer fashion shows, but ask its members where they shop and... A Zara blazer, a pair of Jigsaw trousers and a perfect cocktail outfit from Mango. The British... A Zara blazer, a pair of Jigsaw trousers and a perfect cocktail outfit from Mango. The British...

Victoria Beckham’s Mango collection and why we love a celebrity collab

The big question

Should bigger cars pay more to park?

The Times Daily Quiz

1 Polpo and piovra are Italian words for which sea creature with eight tentacles? 2 Which non-metric temperature... 1 Polpo and piovra are Italian words for which sea creature with eight tentacles? 2 Which... 1 Polpo and piovra are Italian words for which sea creature with eight tentacles? 2 Which...

What to watch: your TV and streaming guide

5 of the best … TV shows about making TV

Viewing GUide

What’s on TV and radio tonight

The best films on bbc iplayer — aftersun to citizen kane, the 50 best netflix tv shows and series to watch right now.

tELEVISION | STREAMING GUIDE

What to watch now on Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Prime Video and beyond

The 50 best bbc iplayer tv shows and series, the 40 best disney+ tv shows and series, the 40 best prime video tv shows and series.

TV listings

What should you watch next?

In case you missed it

Why are we all so stressed out? The 12 ways to really switch off

‘I wouldn’t date a Tory’: why young women are more left-wing

The tramp stamp tattoo is back — with a modern makeover

HILARY ROSE

The Balmoral tour — sadly, it won’t include Andy’s bears

Cin cin! The best restaurants for Italian wine in London

You don’t need to travel to Tuscany for a lovely sangiovese or Piedmont for top nebbiolo — head to these places with deep cellars and clever sommeliers instead

Top-to-toe mother of the bride (or groom) fashion tips

Hannah Rogers on the ultimate looks for the big day

How Princess Beatrice’s husband created the perfect Belgravia family home

Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, an interior designer, shows us his latest project — if the £42 million price tag were no object, he would live there himself

The power of a Chanel bag

The handbag as we know it was conceived by Gabrielle Chanel in 1929 and we have been coveting them ever since

Tourbillon watches that have horophiles in a spin

Watches that display horological arts in elaborate motion. Chosen by Joanne Glasbey. Photography by Baker & Evans

The doll’s house with its own set of Crown Jewels

If you thought doll’s houses were just for the under-tens, think again. From fairy castles to palaces, for centuries these miniature mansions have delighted adults and children alike — and perhaps the most extravagant example of all is now... If you thought doll’s houses were just for the under-tens, think again. From fairy castles to... If you thought doll’s houses were just for the under-tens, think again. From fairy castles to...

Season three of the hit Netflix series takes place in the exotic locations of Koh Samui and Phuket. Thailand expert Hannah Summers sneaks a peek at the stars of the show

25 magical Italian agriturismos

Italy’s farmstays are local in flavour and affordable too — and whether you want yours with added pool, vineyard or olive grove, our expert has the best of the bunch

Travel advice

Airport 100ml liquid rule: when will the UK ban be lifted?

Major airports will miss this summer’s deadline to install the new security scanners, although London City and Teesside are already using the new technology

inspiration

How to find the world’s best Airbnbs — and seven of my favourites

In ten years I’ve stayed everywhere from a mirrored house in Mexico’s highlands to a boutique hideaway in Naples. Here are my secret, tried-and-tested top picks

Anguilla or St Barts — which is better?

Our expert pits two of the Caribbean’s celebrity favourites against one another, revealing her verdict on their hotels, beaches, food and more

The sailing that helped me (and my son) reconnect with my mum

What happens if I miss my cruise ship?

I feel sorry for the stranded cruisers — being on time is overrated

The prize for unleashing the biggest chorus of online tutting this week goes to Jay and Jill Campbell, the South... The prize for unleashing the biggest chorus of online tutting this week goes to Jay and Jill... The prize for unleashing the biggest chorus of online tutting this week goes to Jay and Jill...

I’ve been to more than 40 Greek islands — this one is my favourite

The other day, I did a quick count of all the Greek islands I have visited, and it came to more than 40, with dozens... The other day, I did a quick count of all the Greek islands I have visited, and it came to more... The other day, I did a quick count of all the Greek islands I have visited, and it came to more...

city breaks

The quieter, culture-packed riverside alternative to Dublin

This is why the UK’s theme parks are now so expensive

I saw all of Rome’s best bits in six hours. This is how

kathy lette | travel troubleshooter

My husband wants to bring his pal on holiday

Frans de Waal, leading primatologist who shed light on behaviour

The Dowager Duchess of Argyll, chatelaine of Inveraray Castle

Lou Conter obituary, last survivor from the Arizona in Pearl Harbor attack

John Malathronas, exuberant travel writer and erstwhile music journalist

Trevor Griffiths, dramatist who wrote the influential play Comedians

weather eye

Monsoon battle victories at Kohima and Imphal were turning point in war

from the archive

Jewel thieves escape in motor-car

announcements

Births, marriages and deaths

AND he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he... AND he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it... AND he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it...

A collection of Times obituaries

If you are one of those peculiar people who like to read the obituaries first, after a cursory skim of the news pages... If you are one of those peculiar people who like to read the obituaries first, after a cursory... If you are one of those peculiar people who like to read the obituaries first, after a cursory...

Crossword Club

Times Concise No 9497

Times Quick Cryptic No 2642

Times Cryptic No 28883

Concise Quintagram No 1908

Cryptic Quintagram No 1908

Sudoku No 14811 Mild

Sudoku No 14813 Fiendish

Sudoku no 14812 difficult, killer sudoku no 9401 deadly.

Killer Sudoku No 9400 Moderate

Brain trainer no 4412.

Cell Blocks No 5064

Codeword No 5181

Futoshiki No 4721

Kakuro No 3680

KenKen No 6173

Lexica No 7339

Lexica No 7340

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2. John Hargreaves and family: £780m (£640)

IT has been a busy year for the Hargreaves family. Not only has there been a resurgence in the performance of the Matalan clothing business, in which they have a 52 per cent share, but Jamey Hargreaves, millionaire son of patriarch John, managed to snare socialite Tara Palmer-Tompkinson.

• 02:49, 1 JUL 2005
• Updated 17:02, 12 JAN 2013

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IT has been a busy year for the Hargreaves family.

Not only has there been a resurgence in the performance of the Matalan clothing business, in which they have a 52 per cent share, but Jamey Hargreaves, millionaire son of patriarch John, managed to snare socialite Tara Palmer-Tompkinson.

Matalan's success this year has come as a surprise to many.

Last year, the value of the company's stock fell by more than é200m as the firm issued a profit warning amid increased competition from supermarkets such as Tesco, which was moving into the budget clothing sector.

But in the last year the family have seen their coffers swell as shares in Matalan have made an unexpected recovery to value the business at é982.8m, leaving the family's fortune from Matalan at é511.1m.

A former market trader, Mr Hargreaves founded Matalan in 1985 after being impressed by out-of-town discount stores while on a holiday to the United States.

He opened his first store in Preston and now trades from more than 185, employing 15,700 staff. Mr Hargreaves, 61, lives in Monaco with his wife, Anne, but makes weekly trips by jet to Matalan's Skelmersdale headquarters.

Sons Jamey and Jason work in the family business and are millionaires in their own right, owning significant stakes. Jamey has a consultancy role within its menswear business and Jason has a full-time role as the firm's sourcing director.

Other assets of around é270m - including at least é6m a year in pay and dividends - take their total family wealth to é780m.

• Most Recent

Family Friendly Fishing Rodeo For Kids

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The fishing Rodeo was started by it's namesake - Bill Hargreaves ( read more here ).

It is held annually at the beautiful grand lagoon yacht club, starting with a captain's meeting, the thursday before father's day. fishing starts on friday and continues until the final weigh-in on saturday., prizes are distributed after a mouth watering fish fry on sunday, father's day. this is an event you don't want to miss, even if your name is not on the leader board. there are door prizes, a silent auction and loads of fun for juniors and seniors alike., don't miss out get your tickets today..

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John H. Hargreaves Memorial post 10722 VFW 6 Main St, Pelham, NH

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  Welcome to the home page of the John H. Hargreaves Memorial Post 10722 located in Pelham, NH. Here in Pelham, our Post has one primary mission, and that mission is to help our fellow veterans, their families, and our community. We are very active in the community here in Pelham and across our state and if you are interested in joining the VFW or just donating your time, please inquire with a Post officer to see how you can help.

We welcome you to check out our web site and see what we are all about. We not only support our fellow veterans, but we also sponsor community activities, veteran programs, and youth scholarship programs.  

Scheduled Meetings

Vfw event meeting 6pm, vfw and vfw auxiliary meeting 7pm.

First Thursday of Every Month

Pelham Republican Committee Meeting 7pm

First Monday of every Month

Post Commander: Ray "Hunter" Brunelle

[email protected]    603-401-8023 

Senior Vice Commander: Tom Snelders

  [email protected]        339-227-5590   

Junior Vice Commander: Joe Paradis

   [email protected]   603-490-5205

Quartermaster / Adjutant: Jörg Dreusicke

  [email protected]    603-553-0395 

Post Service Officer: Jörg Dreusicke

[email protected]   603-553-0395 

If you have any questions about the Post in general, any Post event, or charity event we participate in, or you would like to donate your time, items, or money to help veterans, please feel free to reach out to any of Post Officers listed above and they will assist you in getting you the right information.

Pictures and text from Reflections, A Pictorial History of Pelham, New Hampshire 1746 - 1996", Published by The Pelham 250th Anniversary Committee, copyright 1998 

Hargrave Yachts History

Jack Hargrave started his career designing sportfishing boats for Rybovitch before leaving to open his own design shop in 1958. The direction of yachting was forever changed on the day that Willis Slade asked Hargrave to design the world’s first large fiberglass sportfishing yacht. When the resulting yacht, was launched to acclaim in 1960, it marked the beginning of Hatteras Yachts and the birth of a new industry.

Jack Hargrave had a talent for combining timeless exterior profiles with practical, functional interior arrangements, producing vessels that came to define the American style of yachts. Over the next 40+ years, he designed more than 75 powerboats for Hatteras , going on to design over 250 yachts for some of America’s premiere yacht companies, including Burger, Amels, Prairie, Atlantic, Striker, and Halmatic. His influence and skill as the foremost American naval architect and yacht designer led to his induction into the NMMA Hall of Fame in 1996, and kept his company on its pinnacle as America’s top naval design firm.

In 1997, shortly after the legendary designer passed away, a former employee named Michael Joyce returned to the firm to take over as president and CEO. Joyce was determined not to let the iconic company fade away, convinced that Hargrave, far more than just a design firm, was in fact a brand name. Joyce realized that Hargrave could no longer rely on builders for steady business, as the most successful yacht builders had formed their own in-house design and engineering departments. He conceived a plan to expand the company into a constructor of custom luxury yachts, and Hargrave Custom Yachts was born.

Hargrave Yachts produces a full line of custom-built yachts, designed entirely to the specifications of each owner. They offer a unique cost effective program that blends a custom design with a semi-production build process, giving the savings back to the client. Their attention to detail and unwaveringly high standards are paying off; more than half of their owners  have built more than one yacht with them and some are now on their fourth order!

Enjoy the craftsmanship and outright luxury of Hargrave with a beautiful pre-owned Hargrave yacht of your own. While Atlantic Yacht and Ship just sold two Hargrave yachts, ‘King Baby’ and ‘To Life’, we have several other pre-owned Hargrave yachts for you to choose from, including:

Atlantic Yacht and Ship has been an integral leader in the yacht and ship brokerage industry since 1959. Whether you are seeking yachts for sale , or are a boat or yacht owner looking to sell or trade, we have the experience and connections to help you realize your goals. Browse our extensive listings of new and pre owned motor yachts , or call us directly at 1-888-230-0439 and we will help you find the vessel of your dreams.

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Business | Business News

Matalan lenders take control from founder John Hargreaves

Lenders for Matalan are to take ownership of the fashion chain in a deal which will end founder John Hargreaves’ control of the retailer.

A group of lenders, led by Invesco, Man GLG, Napier Park and Tresidor, have sealed a debt-for-equity swap to take reins of the fashion business.

The lenders secured the transaction, which is due to formally complete on January 26, after Matalan launched a sales process in September.

It is understood the lenders did not believe any offers from the sales process adequately valued the business.

It is clear in our third quarter and recent trading performance that whilst the market remains challenging, customers have demonstrated a strong affinity to our brand and proposition, evidenced from our robust and ongoing sales growth

Stephen Hill, Matalan

Mr Hargreaves, who founded the company in 1985, attempted to put a bid together with Elliot Advisers to regain control.

The lenders said they have cut the group’s debt by £257 million to £336 million and agreed up to £100 million in new growth funding as part of the deal.

They added that the move will help to support the future of its “stores, logistics network and website”, pledging that these areas are “unaffected directly” by the recapitalisation.

On Monday, Matalan also revealed that sales grew by 14.6% over the peak December trading period as against the same period a year earlier.

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However, the company warned that recent profits have been “adversely affected” by challenging market conditions and its purchasing plan for the autumn/winter season.

Matalan said stock levels for the autumn “proved to be too ambitious and front-loaded”, resulting in £45 million extra inventory in September against the previous year.

It said trade came further under pressure due to a “very slow start to the season as warm weather stifled demand and the cost of living crisis unsettled consumers”.

The group therefore invested heavily in discounting to stimulate further demand which it said impacted profitability further, amid continued cost inflation.

Stephen Hill, Matalan chief financial officer, said: “As we transition to new ownership and having worked with John and the Hargreaves family for over 20 years, it would be remiss not to emphasise the contribution they have made to building the great business we have today and the many opportunities that lie ahead.

“On behalf of the Matalan team, I would like to express our sincere thanks and appreciation.

“It is clear in our third quarter and recent trading performance that whilst the market remains challenging, customers have demonstrated a strong affinity to our brand and proposition, evidenced from our robust and ongoing sales growth.

“However, the business must continue to adapt its approach to such market conditions, increasing its level of agility and margin resilience.”

Z A R Y A D Y E P A R K

M o s c o w , r u s s i a.

Centrally located steps from St. Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square and the Kremlin, Zaryadye Park sits on a historically charged site saturated by Russia’s collective past and evolving aspirations. As a historic palimpsest, the 35-acre site has been populated by a Jewish enclave in the 1800’s, the foundations of a cancelled Stalinist skyscraper, and the Hotel Rossiya—the largest hotel in Europe until its demolition in 2007. For five years, this central piece of Moscow real estate—encompassing a quarter of downtown Moscow— remained fenced as plans to extend its use as a commercial center by Norman Foster were underway. In 2012, the City of Moscow and Chief Architect Sergey Kuznetsov organized a design competition to transform this historically privatized, commercial territory into a public park. An international design consortium led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) with Hargreaves Associates and Citymakers was selected out of ninety submissions representing 27 different countries.

Wild Urbanism

As the first large scale park to be built in Moscow in the last fifty years, Zaryadye provides a public space that resists easy categorization. It is at once park, urban plaza, social space, cultural amenity, and recreational armature. To achieve this simultaneity, natural landscapes are overlaid on top of constructed environments, creating a series of elemental face-offs between the natural and the artificial, urban and rural, interior and exterior. The intertwining of landscape and hardscape creates a ‘Wild Urbanism,” introducing a new offering to compliment Moscow’s historically formal, symmetrical park spaces. Characteristic elements of the historic district of Kitay-Gorod and the cobblestone paving of Red Square are combined with the lush gardens of the Kremlin to create a new park that is both urban and green. A custom stone paving system knits hardscape and landscape together— generating a blend rather than a border—encouraging visitors to meander freely. Zaryadye Park is the missing link that completes the collection of world-famous monuments and urban districts forming central Moscow.

Traversing between each corner of the park, visitors encounter terraces that recreate and celebrate four diverse, regional landscapes found in Russia: tundra, steppe, forest and wetland. These zones are organized in terraces that descend from northeast to southwest, with each layering over the next to create a total of 14,000 square meters of enclosed, programmed spaces integrated into the landscape: nature and architecture act as one. Visitors can enjoy a river overlook cantilevering 70 meters over Moscow River, media center, nature center, restaurant, market, two amphitheaters and a philharmonic concert hall (scheduled for completion in Spring 2018).

Augmented Microclimates

The sectional overlay also facilitates augmented microclimates that seek to extend the typically short park season. These passive climate-control strategies included calibrating the topography of one of the park’s landscaped hills and the amphitheater's glass crust to leverage the natural buoyancy of warm air. As a result, wind is minimized, plants stay greener longer, and the temperature rises gradually as visitors ascend the slope. Warmer air is retained during the colder months, while in the summer, motorized glass panels open to expel heat through the roof.

These natural zones provide places of gathering, repose and observation, in concert with performance spaces and enclosed cultural pavilions. In addition to these programmed destinations, a series of vista points provide a frame for the cityscape to rediscover it anew. Each visitor’s experience is tailor made for them, by them.

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Millionaire Monaco-based Matalan founder sues PwC over tax liability

John Hargreaves, founder of UK discount retailer Matalan, is suing PwC over claims the firm’s advice left him liable for as much as £135 million in tax. Hargreaves alleges that he placed “complete trust” in the advice the firm gave him when he moved to Monaco 20 years ago.

Matalan is a British budget fashion and homeware retailer based in Knowsley, Merseyside. Having been established in 1985 by John Hargreaves, the brand now has 200 stores in the UK, and employs over 16,000 people.

The Hargreaves family floated the company on the London Stock Exchange between 1998 and 2006, during which time John Hargreaves and his wife moved to Monaco. This alleged non-residence led Hargreaves to claim he was not liable to capital gains tax on a gain of £200 million arising on the disposal of Matalan shares during its time as a public company.

Hargreaves’ claim was resisted by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, and following years of litigation, he has been billed for £135 million, including interest to date. As a result, Hargreaves – whose net worth according to the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List is estimated at £600 million – has opted to sue accounting and consulting giant PwC  for damages.

The case, which was originally filed in 2012, centres upon Hargreaves citing his being liable for taxation as a ‘loss’, which PwC failed to advise him against. When selling part of his shareholding in Matalan in 2000 – the net proceeds of which amounted to £237 million – he intended to do so as a non-resident, something his legal team insists PwC actively encouraged him to do so.

However, while Hargreaves decided to permanently move to Monaco and to become a non-resident in relation to his taxable status in the UK with effect from April 2000 onwards, several years later his status was thrown into question. HM Revenue & Customs decided the steps he had taken were not sufficient, and that he was still a taxable UK resident.

As Hargreaves’s lawyers submitted a new court filing in May 2020, he again suggested that PwC did not fulfil their duties to ensure UK revenue officials would accept his bid to take non-resident status and avoid most taxes in the country. The London lawsuit added that Hargreaves had “placed his complete trust and faith” in PwC as his tax advisers at the time.

If HMRC’s assessment of what Hargreaves owes in tax is correct, his ‘loss’ in relation to that tax year will be around £135 million including interest – while he would retain £102 million from his original share sale, plus interest. As reported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg news, PwC is seeking to throw out aspects of the case, and said in a statement that it believes the lawsuit will ultimately fail.

The story has much in common with Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith, who sued Deloitte and Linklaters  in 2018, in relation to a similar tax gambit. While the sale of her 15.9% stake in the Premier League footballing institution to majority owner Stan Kroenke therefore constituted a total profit, Bracewell-Smith was left furious that she was expected to pay tax on the loan notes used to purchase her share of the club. Bracewell-Smith described this taxation as a £10 million ‘loss’, and further sued for more than £1 million in damages, incurred by her  £1,249,815 move to the city-state tax-haven of Monaco to avoid additional taxation.

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2018 Primetime Emmy & James Beard Award Winner

In Transit: Notes from the Underground

Jun 06 2018.

Spend some time in one of Moscow’s finest museums.

Subterranean commuting might not be anyone’s idea of a good time, but even in a city packing the war-games treasures and priceless bejeweled eggs of the Kremlin Armoury and the colossal Soviet pavilions of the VDNKh , the Metro holds up as one of Moscow’s finest museums. Just avoid rush hour.

The Metro is stunning and provides an unrivaled insight into the city’s psyche, past and present, but it also happens to be the best way to get around. Moscow has Uber, and the Russian version called Yandex Taxi , but also some nasty traffic. Metro trains come around every 90 seconds or so, at a more than 99 percent on-time rate. It’s also reasonably priced, with a single ride at 55 cents (and cheaper in bulk). From history to tickets to rules — official and not — here’s what you need to know to get started.

A Brief Introduction Buying Tickets Know Before You Go (Down) Rules An Easy Tour

A Brief Introduction

Moscow’s Metro was a long time coming. Plans for rapid transit to relieve the city’s beleaguered tram system date back to the Imperial era, but a couple of wars and a revolution held up its development. Stalin revived it as part of his grand plan to modernize the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. The first lines and tunnels were constructed with help from engineers from the London Underground, although Stalin’s secret police decided that they had learned too much about Moscow’s layout and had them arrested on espionage charges and deported.

The beauty of its stations (if not its trains) is well-documented, and certainly no accident. In its illustrious first phases and particularly after the Second World War, the greatest architects of Soviet era were recruited to create gleaming temples celebrating the Revolution, the USSR, and the war triumph. No two stations are exactly alike, and each of the classic showpieces has a theme. There are world-famous shrines to Futurist architecture, a celebration of electricity, tributes to individuals and regions of the former Soviet Union. Each marble slab, mosaic tile, or light fixture was placed with intent, all in service to a station’s aesthetic; each element, f rom the smallest brass ear of corn to a large blood-spattered sword on a World War II mural, is an essential part of the whole.

The Metro is a monument to the Soviet propaganda project it was intended to be when it opened in 1935 with the slogan “Building a Palace for the People”. It brought the grand interiors of Imperial Russia to ordinary Muscovites, celebrated the Soviet Union’s past achievements while promising its citizens a bright Soviet future, and of course, it was a show-piece for the world to witness the might and sophistication of life in the Soviet Union.

It may be a museum, but it’s no relic. U p to nine million people use it daily, more than the London Underground and New York Subway combined. (Along with, at one time, about 20 stray dogs that learned to commute on the Metro.)

In its 80+ year history, the Metro has expanded in phases and fits and starts, in step with the fortunes of Moscow and Russia. Now, partly in preparation for the World Cup 2018, it’s also modernizing. New trains allow passengers to walk the entire length of the train without having to change carriages. The system is becoming more visitor-friendly. (There are helpful stickers on the floor marking out the best selfie spots .) But there’s a price to modernity: it’s phasing out one of its beloved institutions, the escalator attendants. Often they are middle-aged or elderly women—“ escalator grandmas ” in news accounts—who have held the post for decades, sitting in their tiny kiosks, scolding commuters for bad escalator etiquette or even bad posture, or telling jokes . They are slated to be replaced, when at all, by members of the escalator maintenance staff.

For all its achievements, the Metro lags behind Moscow’s above-ground growth, as Russia’s capital sprawls ever outwards, generating some of the world’s worst traffic jams . But since 2011, the Metro has been in the middle of an ambitious and long-overdue enlargement; 60 new stations are opening by 2020. If all goes to plan, the 2011-2020 period will have brought 125 miles of new tracks and over 100 new stations — a 40 percent increase — the fastest and largest expansion phase in any period in the Metro’s history.

Facts: 14 lines Opening hours: 5 a.m-1 a.m. Rush hour(s): 8-10 a.m, 4-8 p.m. Single ride: 55₽ (about 85 cents) Wi-Fi network-wide

Buying Tickets

• Ticket machines have a button to switch to English.
• You can buy specific numbers of rides: 1, 2, 5, 11, 20, or 60. Hold up fingers to show how many rides you want to buy.
• There is also a 90-minute ticket , which gets you 1 trip on the metro plus an unlimited number of transfers on other transport (bus, tram, etc) within 90 minutes.
• Or, you can buy day tickets with unlimited rides: one day (218₽/ US$4), three days (415₽/US$7) or seven days (830₽/US$15). Check the rates here to stay up-to-date.
• If you’re going to be using the Metro regularly over a few days, it’s worth getting a Troika card , a contactless, refillable card you can use on all public transport. Using the Metro is cheaper with one of these: a single ride is 36₽, not 55₽. Buy them and refill them in the Metro stations, and they’re valid for 5 years, so you can keep it for next time. Or, if you have a lot of cash left on it when you leave, you can get it refunded at the Metro Service Centers at Ulitsa 1905 Goda, 25 or at Staraya Basmannaya 20, Building 1.
• You can also buy silicone bracelets and keychains with built-in transport chips that you can use as a Troika card. (A Moscow Metro Fitbit!) So far, you can only get these at the Pushkinskaya metro station Live Helpdesk and souvenir shops in the Mayakovskaya and Trubnaya metro stations. The fare is the same as for the Troika card.
• You can also use Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

Rules, spoken and unspoken

No smoking, no drinking, no filming, no littering. Photography is allowed, although it used to be banned.

Stand to the right on the escalator. Break this rule and you risk the wrath of the legendary escalator attendants. (No shenanigans on the escalators in general.)

Get out of the way. Find an empty corner to hide in when you get off a train and need to stare at your phone. Watch out getting out of the train in general; when your train doors open, people tend to appear from nowhere or from behind ornate marble columns, walking full-speed.

Always offer your seat to elderly ladies (what are you, a monster?).

An Easy Tour

This is no Metro Marathon ( 199 stations in 20 hours ). It’s an easy tour, taking in most—though not all—of the notable stations, the bulk of it going clockwise along the Circle line, with a couple of short detours. These stations are within minutes of one another, and the whole tour should take about 1-2 hours.

Start at Mayakovskaya Metro station , at the corner of Tverskaya and Garden Ring,  Triumfalnaya Square, Moskva, Russia, 125047.

1. Mayakovskaya.  Named for Russian Futurist Movement poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and an attempt to bring to life the future he imagined in his poems. (The Futurist Movement, natch, was all about a rejecting the past and celebrating all things speed, industry, modern machines, youth, modernity.) The result: an Art Deco masterpiece that won the National Grand Prix for architecture at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It’s all smooth, rounded shine and light, and gentle arches supported by columns of dark pink marble and stainless aircraft steel. Each of its 34 ceiling niches has a mosaic. During World War II, the station was used as an air-raid shelter and, at one point, a bunker for Stalin. He gave a subdued but rousing speech here in Nov. 6, 1941 as the Nazis bombed the city above.

Take the 3/Green line one station to:

2. Belorusskaya. Opened in 1952, named after the connected Belarussky Rail Terminal, which runs trains between Moscow and Belarus. This is a light marble affair with a white, cake-like ceiling, lined with Belorussian patterns and 12 Florentine ceiling mosaics depicting life in Belarussia when it was built.

Transfer onto the 1/Brown line. Then, one stop (clockwise) t o:

3. Novoslobodskaya.  This station was designed around the stained-glass panels, which were made in Latvia, because Alexey Dushkin, the Soviet starchitect who dreamed it up (and also designed Mayakovskaya station) couldn’t find the glass and craft locally. The stained glass is the same used for Riga’s Cathedral, and the panels feature plants, flowers, members of the Soviet intelligentsia (musician, artist, architect) and geometric shapes.

Go two stops east on the 1/Circle line to:

4. Komsomolskaya. Named after the Komsomol, or the Young Communist League, this might just be peak Stalin Metro style. Underneath the hub for three regional railways, it was intended to be a grand gateway to Moscow and is today its busiest station. It has chandeliers; a yellow ceiling with Baroque embellishments; and in the main hall, a colossal red star overlaid on golden, shimmering tiles. Designer Alexey Shchusev designed it as an homage to the speech Stalin gave at Red Square on Nov. 7, 1941, in which he invoked Russia’s illustrious military leaders as a pep talk to Soviet soldiers through the first catastrophic year of the war.   The station’s eight large mosaics are of the leaders referenced in the speech, such as Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince and military commander who bested German and Swedish invading armies.

One more stop clockwise to Kurskaya station,  and change onto the 3/Blue  line, and go one stop to:

5. Baumanskaya.   Opened in 1944. Named for the Bolshevik Revolutionary Nikolai Bauman , whose monument and namesake district are aboveground here. Though he seemed like a nasty piece of work (he apparently once publicly mocked a woman he had impregnated, who later hung herself), he became a Revolutionary martyr when he was killed in 1905 in a skirmish with a monarchist, who hit him on the head with part of a steel pipe. The station is in Art Deco style with atmospherically dim lighting, and a series of bronze sculptures of soldiers and homefront heroes during the War. At one end, there is a large mosaic portrait of Lenin.

Stay on that train direction one more east to:

6. Elektrozavodskaya. As you may have guessed from the name, this station is the Metro’s tribute to all thing electrical, built in 1944 and named after a nearby lightbulb factory. It has marble bas-relief sculptures of important figures in electrical engineering, and others illustrating the Soviet Union’s war-time struggles at home. The ceiling’s recurring rows of circular lamps give the station’s main tunnel a comforting glow, and a pleasing visual effect.

Double back two stops to Kurskaya station , and change back to the 1/Circle line. Sit tight for six stations to:

7. Kiyevskaya. This was the last station on the Circle line to be built, in 1954, completed under Nikita Khrushchev’ s guidance, as a tribute to his homeland, Ukraine. Its three large station halls feature images celebrating Ukraine’s contributions to the Soviet Union and Russo-Ukrainian unity, depicting musicians, textile-working, soldiers, farmers. (One hall has frescoes, one mosaics, and the third murals.) Shortly after it was completed, Khrushchev condemned the architectural excesses and unnecessary luxury of the Stalin era, which ushered in an epoch of more austere Metro stations. According to the legend at least, he timed the policy in part to ensure no Metro station built after could outshine Kiyevskaya.

Change to the 3/Blue line and go one stop west.

8. Park Pobedy. This is the deepest station on the Metro, with one of the world’s longest escalators, at 413 feet. If you stand still, the escalator ride to the surface takes about three minutes .) Opened in 2003 at Victory Park, the station celebrates two of Russia’s great military victories. Each end has a mural by Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, who also designed the “ Good Defeats Evil ” statue at the UN headquarters in New York. One mural depicts the Russian generals’ victory over the French in 1812 and the other, the German surrender of 1945. The latter is particularly striking; equal parts dramatic, triumphant, and gruesome. To the side, Red Army soldiers trample Nazi flags, and if you look closely there’s some blood spatter among the detail. Still, the biggest impressions here are the marble shine of the chessboard floor pattern and the pleasingly geometric effect if you view from one end to the other.

Keep going one more stop west to:

9. Slavyansky Bulvar.  One of the Metro’s youngest stations, it opened in 2008. With far higher ceilings than many other stations—which tend to have covered central tunnels on the platforms—it has an “open-air” feel (or as close to it as you can get, one hundred feet under). It’s an homage to French architect Hector Guimard, he of the Art Nouveau entrances for the Paris M é tro, and that’s precisely what this looks like: A Moscow homage to the Paris M é tro, with an additional forest theme. A Cyrillic twist on Guimard’s Metro-style lettering over the benches, furnished with t rees and branch motifs, including creeping vines as towering lamp-posts.

Stay on the 3/Blue line and double back four stations to:

10. Arbatskaya. Its first iteration, Arbatskaya-Smolenskaya station, was damaged by German bombs in 1941. It was rebuilt in 1953, and designed to double as a bomb shelter in the event of nuclear war, although unusually for stations built in the post-war phase, this one doesn’t have a war theme. It may also be one of the system’s most elegant: Baroque, but toned down a little, with red marble floors and white ceilings with gilded bronze c handeliers.

Jump back on the 3/Blue line  in the same direction and take it one more stop:

11. Ploshchad Revolyutsii (Revolution Square). Opened in 1938, and serving Red Square and the Kremlin . Its renowned central hall has marble columns flanked by 76 bronze statues of Soviet heroes: soldiers, students, farmers, athletes, writers, parents. Some of these statues’ appendages have a yellow sheen from decades of Moscow’s commuters rubbing them for good luck. Among the most popular for a superstitious walk-by rub: the snout of a frontier guard’s dog, a soldier’s gun (where the touch of millions of human hands have tapered the gun barrel into a fine, pointy blade), a baby’s foot, and a woman’s knee. (A brass rooster also sports the telltale gold sheen, though I am told that rubbing the rooster is thought to bring bad luck. )

Now take the escalator up, and get some fresh air.

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