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Ex-wife of Russian oligarch drops negligence claim involving Luna

Tatiana Soroka, the former wife of the Russian oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov, has dropped a negligence claim against her former law firm, Payne Hicks Beach, which cited a failure to seize the 'Luna' during divorce proceedings. This marks the latest installment in a decade of an acrimonious legal struggle that began when Tatiana Soroka issued a financial relief petition against her husband, the former Russian senator Farkhad Akhmedov, in 2013. Soroka would officially file for divorce 2016, with London's High Court awarding her a record-breaking £453 million settlement. The negligence claim against Payne Hicks Beach, first filed in 2023, alleged that the lawyer and her firm did not provide the correct advice when Soroka asked them to explore options to have the 'Luna' ­impounded, while she was docked in Miami. The vessel remained there from Jan to March 2017, during which time Soroka hired secondary counsel in the US to discuss the possibility of seizure. Soroka claimed that she asked Payne Hicks Beach to reconsider whether she might be able to enforce the financial remedy order against the yacht. However the firm argued that Soroka had explicitly stated she was not interested in impounding the Luna, and that her stance remained unchanged. The firm had pledged to "vigorously defend" the claim. Now that the case has been dropped, the Russian must cover both the lawyers' costs and her own legal expenses. The 'Luna' was recently implicated in another high-profile case involving a decade-long tax evasion scheme led by Roman Abramovich.