Chelsea boss left fuming

2005-08-07 15:36

London - Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovitch was left fuming after the wrong sort of fuel was pumped into his luxury family yacht, forcing him to re-arrange his summer holiday, a report said on Sunday.

The Russian-born tycoon was said to be "disappointed" after the fuel mix-up involving his 72m pound yacht the Pelorus, while it was docked in Malta to prepare for his family holidays last month.

Any motorist who has put diesel instead of petrol into a car will know the feeling - although not the cost of the error - filling up Pelorus' tank costs 120 000 pounds, and cleaning up the mess could cost at least one million pounds.

"The engineers discovered that the fuel that had been used was incompatible," Simon Borg Cordona, Abramovitch's Maltese agent, was quoted as saying by the Sunday Telegraph.

The Pelorus, which is longer than the pitch at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge ground, is the world's fifth-largest yacht.

Abramovitch was due to have joined it in mid-July with his wife and five children, but they were forced to re-schedule their holidays, flying instead direct to Sardinia where the yacht joined them later.

A spokesperson for the Royal Yachting Association said it was not "a common mistake, but an expensive one."

- AFP