A broker sues Revolut founder Storonsky for EUR 17.5m on Nixie

A broker says it found the boat, then got cut out

Cecil Wright and Partners, the London yacht brokerage, says Storonsky's family office first approached it in October 2024 to help commission a new-build superyacht. According to the broker's account, reported by Sifted and the Financial Times, the family office later asked whether there was a boat already under construction it could buy in the interim rather than wait years for a new-build slot. Cecil Wright says it suggested the answer: a 102.4-metre Lurssen then nearing completion under the project name Jassj, since delivered and renamed Nixie. The broker's case is that this introduction is exactly the service a central agency commission is paid for.

In January 2026, Cecil Wright alleges, Storonsky's adviser told the brokerage's founder that Storonsky had instead bought Nixie directly from the seller, the Canadian businessman and former ice hockey player Patrick Dovigi, cutting the broker out of the deal it says it had arranged. Cecil Wright's claim, filed in London's High Court, seeks 5 percent of the reported EUR 350 million transaction value, or EUR 17.5 million, and alleges Storonsky went behind its back to avoid paying it. A spokesperson for Storonsky's family office told the Financial Times the claim is without merit and will be defended, and that the office would not comment further while the matter is before the court.

Why 5 percent, and why buyers try to avoid it

Five percent is the long-standing central agency commission on a yacht sale, new-build or resale, the same figure the MYBA Central Agency Agreement fixes as standard across the brokerage industry. On a deal the size of Nixie's, that is not a rounding error: EUR 17.5 million is close to the full price of a well-specified 45-metre yacht in its own right. The commission is normally owed to whichever broker is the effective cause of the sale, a principle borrowed from real estate law, even where the buyer and seller go on to sign the paperwork directly rather than through the broker's own contract.

That is precisely the incentive Cecil Wright says Storonsky acted on: once a broker has done the work of sourcing a hull, checking her build status and making the introduction, a buyer who can complete the purchase without the broker's signature on the final contract may calculate that skipping the fee is worth the legal risk. Family offices buying at this level increasingly deal informally, on relationships and verbal instructions rather than signed retainers, which is efficient until a dispute like this one tests whether an informal instruction was ever binding in the first place.

The boat at the centre of it: Nixie's own complicated year

Nixie is a 102.4-metre steel-and-aluminium Lurssen, 15 metres in beam and 3,420 GT, exterior and interior both by the British studio RWD, with ten guest cabins for up to twenty guests and a six-metre semi-suspended glass-bottomed pool over her main deck beach club. Moran Yacht and Ship brokered the original new-build contract in 2021 under the project name Jassj, oversaw construction through Lurssen's Rendsburg and Lemwerder yards, and by its own account also worked the resale that put her in Storonsky's hands. She was technically launched into the Kiel Canal in December 2023, floated in February 2026 and delivered to her owner in June 2026.

Dovigi commissioned the yacht as the original buyer and, on Cecil Wright's account, ended up reacquiring and reselling her before her own delivery was complete, a resale of a boat that had not yet been formally handed over. Boat International reports that Nixie is already being marketed for charter through Edmiston at close to EUR 2.4 million a week, with a maiden voyage stopping first in Gibraltar and a planned public debut at the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2026. That timeline means her new owner is booking her out for charter income in the same months he is contesting who is owed for finding her.

What the case will actually turn on

Neither side has published the documents that will decide it. If Cecil Wright can produce a signed central agency or introduction agreement, the case is straightforward: the buyer owes the fee regardless of who signs the final sale contract. Absent one, the claim depends on the harder, fact-heavy test of whether the broker's introduction was the effective cause of the purchase, weighed against Storonsky's likely defence that his family office sourced or confirmed the deal independently once talks with Dovigi's side began directly. English courts have decided yacht and property commission disputes on exactly that test before, and neither outcome is a foregone conclusion.

The MYBA form exists to make disputes like this one unnecessary, by fixing in writing who is owed what and when before a search even starts. Its absence here, on a deal this large, is itself the story: two parties who could plainly afford to paper the arrangement apparently did not, and are now asking a court to reconstruct their intentions from emails and a verbal introduction eighteen months after the fact.

The lesson for anyone building or buying at this level

For an owner or a family office working with a broker on a search or a new-build, the practical takeaway is contractual, not moral: get a written retainer that defines what triggers commission, an introduction or a signature, before letting a brokerage spend months on your behalf. It costs nothing to sign and removes exactly the ambiguity this case now has to litigate. For a broker, the case is a live test of whether relationship-based work for the largest family offices, done without paper on the assumption that reputation and repeat business will keep everyone honest, is still viable at this end of the market.

Cecil Wright and Partners is not a marginal operator pursuing a speculative claim; it is a brokerage regularly linked to sales above EUR 100 million, and a loss here would be read across the industry as licence to route around any broker without a signed agreement in hand. A win would do the opposite, and would likely accelerate a shift already underway toward brokers insisting on paper before they open a single door for a family office.