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I've seen an oligarch's superyacht – and now I'm channeling Bernie Sanders

<span>Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

I had to read my electricity meter last month. It caused me some alarm to see how speedily that disc thingy spun. The only thing I had on was the oven. I switched it off and ate raw vegetables instead. A week later I was in Dubrovnik, Croatia; close by, a superyacht called Clio was anchored off the island of Mljet. A friend who knows about these things told me it would cost between €500 (£450) and €1,000 an hour in fuel alone; to fill the fuel tank would cost about €200,000. The owner must be very relaxed about spinning discs. Then again, if you can afford $6m (£4.5m) a year for its upkeep, and about $100m to buy it in the first place, your heart probably won’t miss a beat when you read the meter. By the way, I appreciate that I’m mixing currencies here, but that’s superyachting for you: by its nature you get around a bit.

Nearby was an odd-shaped ship called Sputnik. This, it turned out, was the support vessel for Clio, which, we must conclude, even at a length of 72 metres, lacks space. Sputnik sports a helipad, a hangar and several tenders.

It is notoriously difficult to establish what is known in the trade as ultimate beneficial ownership, obscured as it tends to be beneath several corporate layers of trusts and whatnot. But the owner here is widely believed to be the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. I generally try not to get into the politics of envy, but I can’t help channelling Bernie Sanders when I wonder if billionaires must represent evidence of some kind of policy failure somewhere.

Anyway, I bear no ill will to Deripaska, and to prove it I’ll be happy to discuss matters with him over dinner in a wonderful vegan restaurant I came across in Dubrovnik. If we get on well enough, I’d be delighted for him to show me around his fleet later. Dinner, naturally, will be on me. The restaurant, by the way, is called Nishta, which means – ironically in every sense here – “nothing”.