Oligarch billions are vanishing from French Alps resort

A bevy of international flags flutter above Le Croisette, the heart of the ritzy resort of Courchevel in the French Alps, where superrich New Yorkers, celebrities (think Robbie Williams, Elton John and Windsors William and Kate) and oligarchs mingle each season over après-ski champagne.

But in early March, mere days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the flag of the Russian Federation was lowered.

“The tourist office was slammed by a campaign to pull it down,” Gabriella Le Breton, author of the “The Ultimate Ski Book: Legends, Resorts, Lifestyle & More,” told The Post. “It was a big symbolic moment.”

Over the last decades, the resort — composed of four interlinked villages and dozens of massive chalets worth tens of millions of dollars each — has become so synonymous with wealthy Russians that Western visitors have nicknamed it Courchevelski. Russians themselves call it Kushevelevo.

Now, however, the resort is rapidly losing its Russian accent as sanctions put high living on pause for many oligarchs.

“It was strange and surreal to be in Courchevel as Russia was invading Ukraine,” a wealthy Brit visiting the resort this season said, requesting anonymity. “When we arrived, the oligarchs were there in full force. A family in our hotel was sporting head-to-toe red Bogner ski outfits that read Russian Ski Team. We’d see them every morning in the boot room. Just after the invasion? They were a lot more discreet with their attire.”

Courchevel was created from scratch by tourism-chasing French authorities in the wake of World War II, keen to develop a catchall resort in a key location.

Today, Courchevel scores the highest daily rental rate of any major resort in the region, averaging $584 per night, per Knight Frank’s Ski Property Report 2022 (the closest rival: Verbier, at $524). But prices in key locations like Jardin Alpin can reach hundreds of thousands per week.

However, the resort’s origins were more egalitarian.

Master planner Laurent Chappis built several settlements named for their supposed altitude in meters: 1850 (the premier location), 1650, 1550 and 1300. Clustered together on a giant, easily skiable bowl, it was supposed to be a ski hub that anyone could enjoy.

It worked for a while — or at least until über-oligarch Roman Abramovich touched down there in the 1990s, ski expert Le Breton says.

“He allegedly asked the mayor if he could buy the whole of Courchevel but he was turned down,” she dished.

Instead, the currently sanctioned billionaire did the next best thing, scooting round and snapping up chalets en masse to help boost prices so that he and his oligarch pals would be the only folks able to afford a pad there.

For wealthy Russians, the appeal was obvious: Unlike Swiss chalets, and some sites in Austria, expat owners aren’t required by law to rent out their homes for a certain period each year. Instead, they can mothball them and use them for just a couple weeks, if they wish. The just-add-water origins of Courchevel also appeals, as it’s easier to build here than in old-fashioned villages. The price per square foot for new construction in Courchevel 1850 is around $3,588.

The ease of arrival is another factor.

“You can get from where you’re staying to your private jet within 15 minutes — you can ski onto the landing strip. I’ve done it,” Le Breton said. “Or you can have your butler lay out your skis so that when you land, you ski straight down to the restaurant for some oysters and champagne.”

Then again, Le Breton said that many Russians who come to Courchevel aren’t keen to sully their ski suits: “Speak to any instructor and they’ll tell you that a group of Russians will book an instructor for each member of the group, and they’ll wake up every morning and sit there, in the boot room, with a glass of water, all day long, waiting in case one of the group members manages to stir and actually go skiing.”

There are other reasons to come, too: One longtime visitor noted that Russians treat skiing as a networking hobby, a political pow-wow spot. And it isn’t just Russia’s elite who’ve flocked there — one-percenters from its former republics have followed, including Ukraine.

Its upper crust was famously there en masse in early March 2020 and was seen to have brought COVID-19 back from the slopes — so much so that it was nicknamed the “Courchevel virus” at the pandemic’s outset.

And, as a result of COVID-19, Russian numbers in Courchevel had already softened: The EU does not recognize Sputnik V jabs in its pandemic rules, so anyone vaccinated with that was barred from arrival.

The so-called Globo-Russians, though — think anyone wealthy enough to stack passports — were still out in force for their peak season, the first two weeks of January. 

It’s deliberately hard to confirm the names of oligarch chalet-owners here — most are snapped up under complex corporate structures. French media reports confirm that rail magnate and billionaire Nikita Mishin owns the $7,000-per night, five-bedroom chalet dubbed Lys Martagon (via a Luxembourg shell company, of course). Runaway Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov — recently sentenced to 15 years in jail in Moscow — owned a property here.

But one of the area’s biggest whales seems to be owned by insurance magnate Nikolai Sarkisov, who allegedly bought the almost 30,000-square-foot chalet called Apopka last year.

He teamed up with another businessman to build it but after money troubles, the unfinished chalet ended up in bankruptcy — and so Sarkisov rescued it, at a reported price of around $26.4 million. It’ll be an ideal backdrop for Ilona Kotelyukh, his 30-year Instagram influencer wife, to use for a few snaps. 

Courchevel’s supersized chalets are far roomier than anything available at other five-star spots, says Rupert Longsdon, of the Oxford Ski Company, which offers homes for $300,000 per week.

“At some other resorts, the bigger chalets are around 13,000 square feet, but here, they could be more than 30,000 square feet. The whole resort is like an iceberg — what you see above ground is only the beginning.” 

The other major plus in staying in a chalet is, of course, privacy.

“They can sneak their hookers more easily into a chalet than a hotel,” an insider said.

That’s not just scuttlebutt, either. In 2007, French courts broke up a prostitution ring that was shuttling young women from Moscow to Cannes, St. Tropez and Courchevel. Russian billionaire and former owner of the Brooklyn Nets, Mikhail Prokhorov, was arrested during his Courchevel Christams party that year and accussed of procuring hookers for his guests, but he was later released without charge.

But Ceri Tinley, who runs Consensio, another luxe chalet specialist says that Russian are integral to the resort’s economy because their peak season, the two-week period in early January that coincides with Orthodox Christmas, would otherwise be a slow week, as the rest of Europe recovers from holiday excess.

Around 40% of her Courchevel clients each year are Russian, but that dropped to around 10% this winter thanks to vaccine rules, she says. Now, thanks to sanctions, even fewer Russians are expected.

She recalls the impact of the smaller batch of sanctions enacted in the wake of the Crimean invasion. In that case, oligarchs were free to come and go, but chose not to leave their country — and many upper-middle-class Russians dutifully followed their lead, opting instead to ski somewhere like Sochi.

“One of my owners was out there last week, and sat in a restaurant and saw Russians being very discreet, quiet and sitting in the corner, not talking loudly, which is unusual,” she said. “They must worry about anti-Russian sentiment even in a very pro-Russian place like Courchevel.”

But real estate investors looking to pick up Russian-owned properties on the cheap will be disappointed — at least for now — real estate experts said.

“All of these sky markets post-COVID have changed dramatically — they’re very, very strong,” said Douglas Elliman’s Tal Alexander, who was just in Courchevel for the first time. “I didn’t hear of any fire sales or Russians looking to offload property. The market has no inventory versus how much demand there truly is.”

But Oxford Ski’s Rupert Longsdon expects that to change.

“There will be properties owned by Russians that we haven’t heard of that get requisitioned,” he warned. “I’m sure that will happen, and some will probably sit out there on the market.”