Turns out private individuals aren’t the only ones who don’t always get the asking price for their boats: The Iraqi government revealed yesterday that it hasn’t been able to offload its former dictator’s yacht.
The 269-footer, which Saddam Hussein named Qadissivat Saddam in 1981, has attracted interest, but apparently not enough of the right kind. “We have received several offers from buyers, but we were not satisfied with the prices offered,” the Associated Press quotes Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh as saying. The BBC further reports that the government is laying blame on the global economic crisis and has decided it cannot sell her until the slump turns around.
The megayacht, known as Ocean Breeze for a time last year and which the Iraqi government has since renamed Basra Breeze, has been in Piraeus, Greece undergoing maintenance for several weeks, ever since the government won the legal right to her last November. (See this story and its links for the full background.) Since the maintenance work is nearly finished, the yacht will be towed to Basra, in accordance with the Iraqi Cabinet’s wishes, al-Dabbagh says. The Finance Ministry will pay the Greek shipyard as well as legal fees, which al-Dabbagh claims are two percent of the yacht’s value (though he did not reveal what that value is).
Many news reports continue to state that the lavishly outfitted yacht was fitted with rocket-launching systems as well as an escape tunnel that led from Hussein’s stateroom to a submarine.
Leave a Reply