Phi: The sad fate of the seized 58m Royal Huisman superyacht left to decay in London

It’s said men and ships rot in port. Three years after Phi was seized by the UK government, the crew – though frustrated – are fine, but the 58-metre Royal Huisman is failing fast. Elaine Bunting steps on board a superyacht replete with wasted potential...

Every working day, commuters hurry past Phi in London’s Canary Wharf. Few people Google her anymore, this big blue yacht covered with scaffolding and roofed by corrugated sheeting that has been lying here for years, becoming part of the scenery.

If they did, they would discover that Phi, the longest sub-500GRT superyacht ever built, is the glamorous centrepiece of a hugely ambitious project. Four years ago, she came to London expecting to impress those in town for the World Superyacht Awards with her aggressively sculpted design and unique interior. Soon afterwards, she was detained by the government and has not moved since.

Phi is a fairy tale gone sour, a sleeping princess. Her guest beds have never been slept in, the swimming pool never used, the plates never eaten from. She has never travelled to blue water nor lain at anchor.

Sergei Naumenko’s dream boat was built to enjoy with his family, and to charter. Whatever happens now, that precious time may have passed for good. While the boat has been stuck in London, Naumenko’s children have grown into young adults, he has been diagnosed with cancer and the subject of Phi is so distressing to him that the family avoids any mention of it.

Phi left Royal Huisman in the Netherlands in December 2021. The Dutch yard is renowned for building some of the finest custom sailing superyachts in the world, but its motor yachts are rare indeed and Phi left to some fanfare. With exterior styling by Cor D. Rover, naval architecture by Van Oossanen Naval Architects and an interior by Lawson Robb, all executed to Huisman’s exacting standards, a nomination for the following year’s World Superyacht Awards was widely anticipated. 

Her captain, Guy Booth, and his crew made their way to Canary Wharf just before Christmas for the awards, with the intention of wintering there before leaving for the Mediterranean in March 2022.

On 24 February that year, Russia invaded Ukraine. Phi had been getting ready to leave London when, on 27 March, Booth was informed that there was a problem with the hydraulics of the lifting bridge gating them from the River Thames. At 10.00am on 29 March, a temporary movement restriction order was served on Phi. 

The UK government had swiftly decided specifically to amend and then apply the 2019 Russia Sanctions Regulations and detain Phi. It was the first high-profile use of these powers to target the assets of Russian owners, even if, like Naumenko, they were not a designated individual and had no links to the regime.

Naumenko’s legal team has appealed the restriction through the UK’s High Court, Court of Appeal and, most recently, the Supreme Court, proving that he has no connection with the Putin regime, has not benefited from its patronage, and arguing that the UK government could not show how taking the yacht would help put any pressure on Russian policy. An appeals court judge noted that the regulation “is embarrassingly loosely drafted from a legal perspective, yet its intent is unambiguous.” The order has been upheld, and Phi remains firmly tied to the dock at Marsh Wall.

Four lost years

When Phi first arrived here, she was dressed for a night photo shoot. The images showed the boat off in all her futuristic finery, from the main saloon and cocktail bar out across the pool on the aft deck, with the high-rise lights of London’s financial district behind. Those photos have never been distributed or published, and now are as poignant as lost childhood portraits. 

Phi is still in the same berth but now covered in scaffolding and alongside a makeshift fenced pontoon. The owner of the Italian restaurant on the dockside says it is spoiling diners’ views and claims it is bad for business.

Every day, Captain Booth and six crew run up and maintain the boat’s systems and keep her clean and maintained, but Phi has become a forlorn sight. Four years in stasis have been highly detrimental. Royal Huisman was never even able to carry out the necessary warranty work.

“For quite some time, it was an unknown whether companies were permitted to engage and work with Phi,” says Booth, “so there was a huge period of time when small snagging issues become bigger and bigger and bigger, a domino effect.” He cites the example of a small relay under-rated for the current that has damaged PCBs and melted electronics.

Systems, including fire detection and prevention, have had to be shut down. Stray electric current has led to galvanic corrosion in the fuel and water tanks that form the hull sides. The yacht carries 60,000 litres of diesel fuel that cannot be pumped out. “We have these issues on board that we cannot get support for,” he explains.

Because of these problems, it has become impossible to get protection and indemnity insurance, and the boat has fallen out of class. “If this boat caught fire at the quay – and we have nearly had that happen several times – or a through-hull valve was accidentally kicked and water started pouring into the engine room, my priority would be to round up the crew and stand on the quay. And she would sink, or burn, right here on the quay,” Booth says.

Some of the symptoms of deterioration, although microscopic, are significant. In the time Phi has been incarcerated at Canary Wharf, six high-rise apartment buildings have been built on the opposite side of the dock. Tiny airborne fragments of cut steel have eaten into the boat’s painted surfaces. Small bubbles are forming under its hallmark Stars & Stripes blue paint where corrosion has occurred. Cement dust and chunks of concrete continually powder the deck. The corrugated sheeting set up for protection merely keeps off the worst.

“Phi needs help. We need contractors on board, we need a suitable facility where we have access to forklift trucks, overhead cranes, haul-out facilities, shore-based storage, shore-based electrical power, waste management, extraction, heating, lighting – all these sorts of things,” Booth says. “We can’t start doing work here. So the state of the boat is rapidly deteriorating, and our efforts to slow it down are only mitigations.”

Phi ought to be an attraction, but it is now a target. Intruders have made their way on board 18 times. At first, it was “youths looking for mischief”, Booth concluded, but recent incursions have been far more sinister. Four masked men tried to get through the doors despite being pushed back by crew on board.

Behind the fenced-off pontoon, Phi remains a mystery. Since her feted launch, only a few people have been allowed to see inside the boat to appreciate the design details and narrative behind it. The scope was enormously ambitious, and that is reflected in the project’s name. Taking the Greek letter phi, it alludes to the golden ratio, a mathematical concept, an irrational and transcendent number like pi, whose non-repeating representation continues infinitely. 

It also represents the conception of perfect beauty in nature, such as the Fibonacci sequence of spiral patterns found in sunflower seeds or pine cones, or in the proportions of a nautilus shell – indeed, even in the most basic building blocks of all living organisms, the double-helix structure of DNA.

Layered on to that are the themes of nature underneath, on and above the surface of the sea; the interior of Phi reflects those motifs on each deck. Designer George Wolstenholme and a team from Lawson Robb created an interior that has an almost galactic feel, themed on the sea, sky and space. 

The main deck features high-gloss blue smoked oak joinery, fluted leather panels, marble surfaces, teak with dynamic sculptural panelling details and a large circular dining table custom made in straw marquetry forming a starburst pattern. The owner was adamant that he didn’t want anything that could be bought from a shop. Showing, as an example, the cutlery made specially for Phi, Booth extracts a knife from its individual divider and holds it up. “This has never cut a thing,” he declares.

The owner’s suite occupies a full penthouse deck. The huge bedroom opens out with semi-circular pocketed doors to the privacy of an aft deck. It is filled with intricate handmade details, from bespoke resin panels flanking the passageway etched to resemble coral atolls seen from above, to curved, bleached oak-veneered panels bevelled with small indents to reveal darker layers, representing constellations of stars in a night sky. 

To one side of the owner’s sitting room is also a small blue oak cabinet topped with a hand-built orrery, a mechanism that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system.

The themes are carried in details that guests might not notice immediately, and perhaps are designed to be perceived by degrees so that they delight through discovery. With no photos to illustrate them, the recurring leitmotifs might sound grandiose, but it feels carefully orchestrated, and the quality of the workmanship is exquisite.

Going to waste

Despite this, Phi feels empty and sombre. The exterior cushions are stacked up, still in their plastic wrappings. The seven-metre pool on the aft deck has suffered from electrolysis as a result of stray current and is emptied; its raised floor makes it look as if it could just be a figment. Inside, the dry, air-conditioned environment is causing ceiling panels to shift and drop, some of the coatings have failed, marble is cracking and leather is shrinking. The ideas and craft are all going to waste.

“This is really something I was trying to trailblaze, as yachts are my passion and this was my dream project,” says Wolstenholme sadly. “It was a forward-looking team, and the owner wanted us to stretch our legs and make something not seen before.” The detainment has denied him the “serious leg-up” the team felt they had earned. “Only elements have been shown behind closed doors,” he adds sadly.

“It is just a sad thing,” agrees yacht designer Cor D. Rover. “This is a record-setter, built with a narrow, slender, fuel-efficient hull, that is the result of us dreaming of something different. For a boat of this size to have a full owner’s penthouse deck that is all private is kind of unique. We expected a lot from it, and I was, and still am, very proud to be involved in this project and with this shipyard. The footage of the sea trials in the North Sea, in bad weather and dark skies, is all we have.”

From its inception, the Phi project was about more than just this yacht. It includes Phi Phantom, a 36-metre aluminium support yacht that carries tenders, water toys and 60,000 litres of diesel for its mothership and an Axopar tender powered by two Cox marine diesel engines, specially reinforced to be lifted out from above by a four-point lift.

The project also encompassed a special custom-built 14.5-metre gentleman’s day cruiser built in cold-moulded wood by the revered Spirit Yachts. It may give the appearance of restrained elegance, but its twin Audi V8 turbo engines could blast your picnic to the winds with a top speed of 57 knots.

These other yachts, based in Europe, are free to move and be used by the owner or chartered, but they are supporting actors without the main character.

The detainment of Phi represents a loss of value not only to the owner but also to all those involved in the design and build, says Booth. “All of these were curated partnerships and were an exercise in value as well as cost. That collaboration value has all stopped,” he says.

Despite their latest appeal being dismissed by the Supreme Court in late July 2025, Booth and the owner’s legal team are determined to continue to fight to get Phi released. Their intention now is to mount a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the UK is wrongly depriving Naumenko of the use and enjoyment of his property.

“We don’t think that is an uncertain outcome,” Booth says. “We believe it will decide that the detention of this vessel is unlawful and, when it does, we will claim damages,” he says. If that happens, the claim would run to many millions.

In the meantime, every day Booth and his crew come to work on a patient that lies perpetually on life support.

“Kudos to Guy, he’s an active captain who was used to running charters and entertaining clients, and every day he’s been taking care and doing his best for a baby that cannot move and is deteriorating. Psychologically, it is a very dark tunnel,” says Rover.

“Eventually, Phi will be free to move – somehow. “She won’t be up for an award because of the launch date, but I still think she’s ahead of her time in looks and concept and is a landmark boat.”

“There are so many unsung achievements from this project,” adds Wolstenholme. “It was such a stoic collaboration between so many of us to create something phenomenal that as yet remains mostly unseen.”

Booth agrees: “Three years ago, she was shocking inside and out, but the climate has changed and an increasing pool of yachts will be trying things at the cutting edge, but Phi definitely still stands up to anything that is around at the moment. When she can be shown beyond closed doors, you will see that this whole thing is an example of how yacht projects can be, and I think will cause a change.”

Until then, Phi must stay fenced off and under cover, a very public showpiece of political policy and judicial clout.

First published in the October 2025 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.