In the best restaurants along the Bosphorus strait Roman Abramovich’s generous tips are setting tongues wagging as much as they once did in London.

“I love Abramovich so much,” enthuses Omer Ataysin, a favoured Istanbul-based chef. No wonder; Ataysin received a $10,000 bonus for a night’s work last summer providing a barbecue for the former Chelsea owner and his friends at his hideaway villa.

Turkey is a necessary home for Abramovich now, with 2022 sanctions from the European Union and British Government curtailing his days of carefree globetrotting elsewhere. His life is still one of opulence and luxury, however, and big wads of cash await those who help him forget his troubles.

“He loves eating lamb and kebab,” explains Ataysin, before sharing a picture he had taken with Abramovich, as well as footage of the first meal he served for him at a waterfront restaurant in Marmaris on the south-west coast of Turkey.

“He always wants to order cold appetisers and my special salad for his home. He especially loves lamb tenderloin and spicy kebab... I go to his private boat every summer to cook.”

£500m super yacht that never sails

Abramovich’s two biggest super yachts and his main supply boat have all been floating in Turkish waters for much of the past three years, awaiting the oligarch’s next move. The most prized possession of all is the £500 million Eclipse, a spectacular floating palace moored in comparatively modest surroundings. No longer do these vessels spend new year in the Caribbean and move to Europe for the warmer weather months, with stop-offs in Cannes and Dubrovnik.

Instead, as Telegraph Sport learns after paying the Eclipse a visit on a quiet midweek afternoon, it is now an incongruous mainstay in modest Marmaris.

The Turkish port city of just fewer than 100,000 inhabitants is more popular with the budget-conscious all-inclusive British holidaymaker. A sweeping coastline boasts a clutch of attractive waterfront restaurants but there are plenty of fast-food options and Europop nightclubs to bring in the crowds.

It is impossible, therefore, to miss the Eclipse, towering over every other boat at the easternmost Albatros Marina. At her unassuming base, she is directly tethered to a jetty that helps staff come and go while also reducing fuel costs. Even Abramovich has his limits, it seems, after reports in 2022 emerged that it ran up a $1.66 million fuel bill at the marina within months of arriving. Six or seven local fishermen line a narrow nearby beach on the edge of woodland but any semblance of tranquility is undermined by four female security guards who film anyone who walks in close proximity to the jetty’s locked gate.

From small clearings up a tree-lined coastal road, it remains possible to get a good close-up glimpse of the 533ft giant, which boasts bulletproof glass and armour plates wrapping the length of Abramovich’s master suite. The owner, however, has not visited in months, and, as dusk falls, only a handful of lights are switched on in the main cabin.

“We are all excited when he comes, but he hasn’t been on for at least six months,” says Hakan, who works in a bar on Setur Netsel Marmaris Marina.

Eclipse’s smaller sister, the Solaris, is moored at Gocek Port Azure Marina, having last been on a pleasure cruise in May 2024. Supply boat Garcon is also nearby but few have seen Abramovich there either, although Phillis Dalton, a Scottish woman flying into Dalaman, claims her expat cousin went scuba diving with Abramovich after the Russian left his boat for a dinghy last year. “Roman thought he [her cousin] was a local and was very nice,” says Ms Dalton.

Oligarch’s world suffocated by sanctions

The yachts stay moored while Abramovich figures out his life in exile from the West. It has been an extraordinary three years even by the standards of the former plastic duck salesman, who rose among the first generation of billionaire oligarchs after the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1992.

Abramovich was with family on the Cote d’Azur when he learnt that Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine. Since being sanctioned in the weeks that followed, Abramovich has popped up at peace negotiations, fallen victim to reported poisonings and even allegedly helped to oversee diplomatic prisoner releases.

Yet only the chef that cooks him his favourite lamb proves willing to talk about Abramovich’s movements now. His inner circle have made clear for months the mundane day-to-day is strictly off limits. Only in the vaguest terms will other associates confirm Abramovich has made Turkey his home along with Russia and Israel. Tayyip Erdogan, the president, is the only other figure to confirm the oligarch’s movements in his capital city, which has become increasingly important for those keen to keep a safe distance from western Europe.

Abramovich has always demanded loyalists keep their counsel. Even as his 2003-22 Chelsea ownership era made him a household UK name, he was the famous face that never spoke – sometimes even to his managers. Thomas Tuchel, now England head coach, was six months into his stint at Stamford Bridge when he first met him while the Italian Carlo Ancelotti was said to only receive single question-mark texts when results went badly.

Now the 58-year-old, fast approaching a third anniversary of sanctions from the UK and EU, is more publicity-averse than ever. Pictured unwittingly just a handful of times since 2022 – making the photograph handed over by Ataysin even more remarkable – he usually instructs bodyguards to jostle in front of prying camera lenses. Since splitting with his socialite wife Dasha Zhukova in 2017, personal life details around the father of seven have been just as scant. Moscow-based Telegram gossip exchanges, awash with speculation about his family life, are dismissed categorically by sources close to the Russian. Abramovich, in turn, has been more low profile than ever in recent months, with just one unconfirmed sighting on an apparent business trip in Russia shortly before Christmas.

Well-placed sources believe Abramovich remains a go-between in back-door negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Legal documents in the United States say he operated as a potential peacemaker until at least the end of 2022. With such a role potentially leaving Abramovich with a target on his back. Secular Turkey – where even Hamas looked set to be welcomed in recent weeks – is an obvious neutral territory to call a main strategic base.

One well-connected Moscow-based Abramovich expert says: “There are probably four centres of gravity – Israel, Russia, Turkey and the Caribbean, with the yachts giving him good flexibility.” He is also said to have looked at a property in Dubai in the past 18 months. But the list of countries where he can realistically travel – for a man who once had it all – must now feel vanishingly small.

Proceeds from £2.35bn Chelsea sale remain in limbo

Turkey, the country where East meets West, is an ideal no man’s land in which to draw breath. Allies hint he is losing the stomach to fight his restrictions in the courts although there have been rumours in Moscow that he would be willing to open dialogue with Donald Trump. Appeals against his European sanctions, however, are all but ruled out amid dismay at the EU court in Brussels dismissing his challenge more than a year ago. Abramovich “does not have the ability to influence the decision-making of any government, including Russia, and has in no way benefited from the [Ukraine] war”, a statement on his behalf still maintains.

Allies point to Forbes estimates that Abramovich’s current worth of £7.96billion is still £4.1billion down on his pre-war wealth. But the EU and UK remain unmoved by such claims, remaining as certain as ever that Evraz – the steel giant he partly owns – significantly benefits Putin.

All sides agree, however, that February 24, 2022 – the day Putin invaded – turned Abramovich’s world upside down.

With sanctions looming, he called in the Raine Group and put Chelsea up for sale, promptly promising that the proceeds would be sent to all victims of the Ukraine war. The club was sold by May but the £2.35 billion proceeds remain untouched in a frozen account. Mike Penrose, a former Unicef director whom Abramovich’s advisors called in to launch an independent foundation for Ukraine and the impact of the war, has done all the groundwork to ensure the record fund can immediately get to work, saving “thousands” of lives. Yet the UK and EU still block its release on the basis that it must be spent only within Ukraine’s borders, fearful of the funds heading back to Russia.

The new Labour administration has promised it is “doubling down” on efforts to strike an agreement with Abramovich’s side. But several sources close to talks observe that the process between lawyers moves slower than ever. In Moscow, Kremlin supporters frame the situation as a laughable reflection of Western ineptitude.

At Stamford Bridge, meanwhile, the fans still fete him but there is animosity towards Abramovich in the boardroom that succeeded him at Chelsea, as the Premier League appears poised to penalise the club with a fine for alleged off-the-book payments. The Telegraph previously detailed how Abramovich and the Government had agreed to drop the sale price by £100 million in 2022 to cover such eventualities.

But Abramovich’s pre-sale pledge that “I hope that I will be able to visit Stamford Bridge one last time to say goodbye to all of you in person” now seems fanciful. Just as galling for him is his billion-pounds worth of seized French property, including his beloved Château de la Croë. Frozen assets in Jersey, meanwhile, total £7 billion.

Some reports suggest he is treading a fraught path in Moscow, too. The Wall Street Journal and Bellingcat first identified a piercing pain in the eyes that Abramovich suffered after attending peace talks in Ukraine, on the border with Belarus, in 2022. Accounts of what really happened vary, but some raised the prospect that it had been a warning sign to him from Kremlin hardliners trying to sabotage the summit.

Other corners of the world refuse to give up on Abramovich. He is still celebrated on the island of St Barts, where he would entertain a heady mix of movers and shakers – including Beyonce, Paul McCartney and Rupert Murdoch – at parties on the Eclipse. “The island loves him,” one islander told Forbes even in the months after war had erupted. He paid a reported $4 million to rebuild the Saint-Jean soccer stadium on the island in 2010 and then footed the bill for renovations in 2017 after Hurricane Irma. Today the venue is casually known by locals as the Roman Abramovich Stadium.

Israel was another obvious potential sanctuary for Abramovich, orphaned at three and cast as an outsider in childhood, with ‘Jew’ written next to his name on the school register. Donations to causes that tackle anti-Semitism have totalled tens of millions over the past decade. In 2021, Israeli president Isaac Herzog hailed his regime at Chelsea as a “force for good” following the club’s “Say No to anti-Semitism” campaign.

Away from the club, he privately funded a forest dedicated to Lithuanian Jews killed in the Holocaust. That project was rooted in personal family tragedy as he is believed to be descended from victims of a bloody Second World War massacre. Abramovich was then granted Portuguese citizenship to add to his Russian and Israeli passports in April 2021 under a law that offered naturalisation to descendants of Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 400 years ago during the Inquisition. Since the war, however, the Portuguese government moved to tighten the law, with the rabbi who helped him obtain citizenship told he could not leave the country.

Turkey, therefore, is where Abramovich will have found it easiest to set up camp. He is initially said to have rented a waterfront abode at a cost of $40,000 a month. One bar worker also claims her former boyfriend worked on a leased yacht Abramovich then used as a temporary base. More recently, however, his city digs have become less clear. Members of his inner circle maintain he has not bought a property there, but local reports link him to a sprawling villa in the upmarket Vanikoy district.

CNN Turkey reports the property in question is owned by another rich Russian. Whoever owns it is currently in a major dispute with the Turkish Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, which has criticised “unauthorised construction activities” in the protested “Bosphorus foreview area”. The structure in question – a potential new helipad – was demolished in September on government orders.

Proving a link between the property and Abramovich is supremely difficult. Heavy greenery, thick mature trees and the odd security checkpoint block all prying eyes within 250 metres in an arrangement set up by previous owner Adnan Oktar, an Islamic televangelist and cult leader jailed in 2022 for leading a criminal gang and the sexual abuse of minors.

It is the type of security that Abramovich would normally covet, wherever he is. But for all the privacy and safety he can still afford, he cannot feel free. Abramovich now lives, in many respects, in a gilded cage.