The A-Z of Russian oligarchs

Vagit Alekperov

A The undisputed oligarch of oligarchs, Roman Abramovich, the 39-year-old owner of Chelsea Football Club, is Russia's richest citizen with an estimated $28.7 billion to his name.

He spends much of his time in London and visits Russia several times a year to perform his duties as one of its regional governors.

He made his billions in the anarchic 1990s, when much of Russia's industry was sold off to a canny few for a fraction of its real value. In his case, he managed to get his hands on major oil and aluminium interests.

Last year he sold the crown jewel in his empire - the Sibneft oil company - to the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom for $20.6 billion, the biggest transaction in Russian corporate history. He owns three superyachts and a private jet.

B One of the Russian oligarchy's most colourful and political characters, with an estimated $1.6 billion in his pocket, is 60-year-old Boris Berezovsky, a former maths professor who used his powers of logic to get rich. Afraid of being jailed by the Kremlin, Berezovsky won political sanctuary in Britain where he now lives.

The Russian Government has unsuccessfully tried to have him extradited on fraud charges. Berezovsky insists the charges are politically motivated. A fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, he has dedicated himself to toppling the Russian President.

Berezovsky made his money in the 1990s by capitalising on his close contacts with the entourage of then President Boris Yeltsin. His connections saw him acquire lucrative stakes in the Russian oil, car and media industries, many of which he has since sold at enormous profit.

C Fifty-six-year-old Shalva Chigirinsky is one of the movers and shakers responsible for Moscow's dramatic metamorphosis from drab Soviet-era city into a cutting-edge metropolis. Worth an estimated $1.5 billion, he is one of the Russian capital's most successful property developers. He is also paying British architect Sir Norman Foster to design what will be Europe's tallest tower, to redevelop an entire island district in St Petersburg, and to create a huge entertainment complex in southern Moscow.

Chigirinsky makes no secret of his dislike for Roman Abramovich, whom he accuses of having stolen half an oilfield. Abramovich denies the accusation.

D Oleg Deripaska is the king of Russia's aluminium industry, a man whose name strikes fear into many of his competitors. With a fortune estimated at $14 billion, he also has interests in the timber and car industries. His competitors allege that he uses strong-arm tactics in hostile takeovers.

In 2001 he married Polina Yumasheva, former President Boris Yeltsin's granddaughter, and has long enjoyed close relations with Russia's political elite. He began his career in 1993 as a commodities trader.

E Vladimir Evtushenkov, 57, a Bill Gates lookalike with an estimated $12 billion to his name, is Russia's eighth-richest man. The source of his wealth is the telecoms-to-real-estate conglomerate that he controls called Sistema, which he helped set up in 1993 and which includes some of the juiciest assets that once belonged to the state in Moscow - the Russian capital's fixed-line telephone network, its principal mobile phone operator MTS (which is now Eastern Europe's biggest), the iconic Children's World department store, and a big insurance company.

Sistema also makes microchips and has a foothold in the biotech industry. Married with two children, Evtushenkov is regarded as one of the most erudite oligarchs, and has a doctorate in economics. Like most oligarchs, he owns a private jet.

F Mikhail Fridman is worth an estimated $16.5 billion. His success is based on the banking-to-telecoms consortium Alfa Group, which he founded. He is one of the company's majority shareholders. He has come a long way since his student days in Moscow, when he made extra cash by selling theatre tickets and organising discos.

Fridman has traditionally enjoyed good relations with the Kremlin but suffered a setback earlier this year when his sprawling dacha (country house) was seized by the Government.

G Vladimir Gusinsky, 53, used to be one of Russia's most powerful media magnates, but he lost almost everything and is now more minigarch. His story shows how dependent oligarchs are on the Kremlin's goodwill. Gusinsky flourished under President Boris Yeltsin but saw his empire collapse when Vladimir Putin came to power.

In the 1990s the flamboyant former theatre director appeared to have the Midas touch, founding Media Most, a company that included the Segodnya newspaper, independent TV station NTV, and a banking and property empire. But NTV became a thorn in the Kremlin's side with its highly critical coverage of the war in Chechnya.

In 2000 Gusinsky was accused of embezzlement and money laundering and was forced into exile. He now lives in Israel and his fortune is estimated to have dwindled to $187 million, a figure not high enough for him to make it into Russia's "Golden 100".

H... is for Khan (since there is no H in the Cyrillic alphabet). Forty-four-year-old German Khan is estimated to have $10.6 billion to his name, but he is regarded as one of the most reclusive, low-profile oligarchs.

A close friend and business partner of fellow oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Viktor Vekselberg, with whom he holidays every year, he owns a major stake in telecoms and banking consortium Alfa Group. But his speciality is oil. In the 1980s he met Fridman and several other future oligarchs while studying at Moscow's Institute of Steel and Alloys, a twist of serendipity that was to make his fortune.

I Boris Ivanishvili used to be known as "the man who nobody knew anything about", despite being worth an estimated $7.4 billion. Until 2005 there was only one photograph of him in the public domain.

Today more is known about Russia's 19th-richest individual, who is in fact of Georgian origin. Aged 50, and married with three children, the source of his wealth is metals and banking. Forbes' description of the secret of his success could apply to dozens of other oligarchs. "He bought firms that nobody needed for tens of millions of dollars and sold them for billions of dollars."

He has now largely sold up and his money is in investment funds. He lives in a huge house cut out of a hillside in his native Georgia.

J Boris Jordan and Stephen Jennings are Russia's honorary oligarchs. They do not possess Russian passports but they helped the oligarchs to accumulate their wealth in the anarchic post-Soviet 1990s, managing to make some serious money themselves along the way. In 1992 they were brought in by the Kremlin to organise the country's first privatisation auction, of the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory.

Jordan is an American investment banker of Russian origin, Jennings a rugby-loving New Zealander. When the duo realised how cheaply Russia was going to sell off its crown jewels, Jordan, now 39, and Jennings, now 46, decided they wanted a slice of the action. The two made a fortune.

Investment bank Renaissance Capital, which Jennings now heads, is estimated to be worth around $2.3 billion, while Jordan manages $886 million worth of investments through his Sputnik Investment Fund.

K Once Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 42, is now the country's most famous inmate, having being jailed for fraud and tax evasion last year.

His supporters contend that he was imprisoned because of his growing interest in politics, and his opposition to President Putin. The Kremlin claims that he was a latter-day Al Capone involved in organised crime. who had to be stopped.

When Forbes published its first Russian rich list in 2004, Khodorkovsky headed it with an estimated $23.6 billion. That figure is now estimated to have dwindled to several hundred millions.

The original source of his wealth was oil, via the Yukos company that he built up during the 1990s. He is serving his eight-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony where he was recently attacked by a fellow inmate with a cobbler's knife.

L Vladimir Lisin, 50, used to work in a coal mine in Siberia. Now he is worth an estimated $17.7 billion and heads one of Russia's largest steel-makers. He sold a 7 per cent stake in his steel giant Novolipetsk to investors on the London Stock Exchange last year. The sale raised more than $960 million and he still has an 83 per cent stake to fall back on.

He has never dabbled in politics and worked his way up from the shop floor. In 1993 he became involved with Novolipetsk. While others were buying luxury cars or villas in France, he thought "it was time to buy up shares".

M Nicknamed "the tank" because of his bear-like stature, Aleksei Mordashov is estimated to be worth $13.3 billion and is a traditional oligarch in so far as he is a steel magnate. He owns a large stake in steel giant Severstal, which was privatised in 1993. He was finance director of the Cherepovets steel mill north of Moscow and was asked by the elderly general director to buy up the company's shares to prevent them falling into the hands of an outsider. Mordashov snapped up a lot on the cheap for himself. He later turned it into a powerful conglomerate, buying a car-maker, coal mines, railway companies and port facilities.

Unusually for an oligarch, he has lamented the huge gulf between Russia's rich and poor.

N Leonid Nevzlin, 46, must be one of the few billionaires who is also wanted for murder. Like Khodorkovsky, he has incurred the Kremlin's wrath and now lives in Israel. He contends that the fraud and murder charges against him are fabricated, and is doing all he can to avoid extradition.

In 2004, the last time he appeared on Forbes' Russian rich list, he was estimated to be worth around $2.9 billion. That figure is thought to be much lower today. Like Khodorkovsky, a large proportion of his wealth was tied up in the oil company Yukos, much of which has since been seized by the Kremlin.

He began his ascent in 1987 when he answered a job ad. He became a computer programmer working with Khodorkovsky and remained the famous oligarch's right-hand man until 2001.

O Of all the oligarchs, Valery Oif, a close associate and friend of Roman Abramovich's, is the most mysterious. According to Forbes, he is worth around$1.5 billion. Yet there is precious little information on him, apart from that he is 42 years old and married with one son. This is all the more surprising given that he is a senator representing a Siberian constituency in Russia's Federation Council. The source of his wealth is oil, but he was among those who set up a company with Abramovich making plastic toys, and he appears to have been one of his most important lieutenants ever since.

P In the dying days of the USSR, Vladimir Potanin had just over $14,500 in his pocket, but he had a vision. Fifteen years later he is worth an estimated $11.8 billion, and the company he manages, Norilsk Nickel, is the world's largest producer of palladium and platinum.

He won control of Norilsk in the 1990s from the mine's communist-era directors. In 1995 he devised a controversial scheme whereby the Government sold off state enterprises on the cheap in return for loans.

Potanin has always been an insider. His father was a senior trade official in the USSR and he graduated from Moscow's elite Institute for International Relations. In 1996 he became the country's first Deputy Prime Minister under Yeltsin, the highest office ever held by an oligarch. He is 45 and is building his own ski resort in southern Russia.

Q There is no Q in the Cyrillic alphabet, but Paul Klebnikov, an American of Russian origin, was the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, and it was he who in May 2004 published the country's first authoritative rich list. Less than two months after the list hit the newsstands, Klebnikov was shot dead in a drive-by contract killing. He was 41. His killers have never been found and some believe that he may have been killed because of his exposure of the famously secretive oligarchs.

R In 1967 Viktor Rashnikov was a humble fitter in a workshop in one of the Soviet Union's biggest steel plants. Nearly 40 years later, he chairs the company's board and has an estimated personal fortune of $8.5 billion.

The 57-year-old and a group of managers are thought to control 99 per cent of the shares in the iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk, Siberia, Russia's largest steel producer.

Little is known about Rashnikov except that he was born and bred in Magnitogorsk and still lives there. He worked his way up from the workshop floor to become the plant's general director in 1997.

S Nikolai Smolensky is the controversial 25-year-old known as "baby oligarch". Aleksander Smolensky, his father, is an oligarch of classic 1990s vintage who is no less controversial. The bank he once controlled, SBS-Agro, collapsed during Russia's financial crisis in 1998, leaving thousands of without their life savings.

While many Russians were ruined by the 1998 crash, Aleksander Smolensky somehow bounced back and created a new bank that his son briefly chaired before it was sold on for $325 million. Smolensky jnr is estimated to be worth about $148 million.

T Rustam Tariko is a vodka oligarch with a taste for fine art and an eye for beautiful women. The 44-year-old is thought to be worth just over $2.9 billion and the source of his wealth is Russian Standard - a vodka-to-banking empire that has rapidly become one of Russia's most successful companies.

Tariko hit the headlines in early May when he was outed as the buyer of Pablo Picasso's Dora Maar with Cat. He paid more than $150 million for the canvas.

He was in London for the Russian Economic Forum earlier this year, when he spoke on the theme of luxury as a Russian national idea. He should know. His dog, Dow Jones, wears a Louis Vuitton collar, goes on holiday with him to Sardinia, and has its own "nanny".

U Alisher Usmanov is known in business circles as "the hard man of Russia". Worth around $5 billion, Usmanov, 52, has built up a metals and mining empire. He controls his affairs through a holding company called Metalloinvest and has admitted that his shares are his first love.

V No matter how much wealth he accumulates, oil and metals magnate Viktor Vekselberg seems destined to always be known as "the bloke who bought those Faberge eggs". In 2004 this most patriotic of oligarchs spent an estimated $148 million to acquire the second-largest collection of Russian Faberge Easter eggs in the world. His stated aim was to bring them back to the motherland so that ordinary Russians could admire their own cultural legacy. He has an estimated $16 billion to his name.

He was born in Ukraine and has a reputation for steering well clear of Kremlin politics. He started out in 1988 trading computers before going into business with a former classmate who had emigrated to the US. Oil is the main source of his wealth.

W Elena Baturina is the only woman to have made it on to Forbes' Top 100 list, a status the 43-year-old has achieved with a little help from her powerful husband Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. According to Forbes, Baturina is worth $3.8 billion, her fortune coming from a monolithic Moscow construction company called Inteko, which she owns. Her detractors allege that she has been able to cash in on Moscow's construction boom thanks to the patronage of her husband.

X Oil tycoon Vagit Alekperov certainly has the X-factor. Forbes estimates he is worth $20 billion, amassed by building up a huge stake in Russia's largest oil firm, LUKoil.

The 55-year-old comes from oil-rich Azerbaijan, and in the dying days of the USSR had the good fortune to be appointed First Deputy Minister of Fuel and Energy, a position he used to lobby for the merger of three major Russian oil producers. That firm became LUKoil and he assumed its presidency.

Y An oligarch who actually appears to have built up a business rather than "inherited" it, Igor Yakovlev is the owner of Russia's largest electronics retailer, Eldorado. The 40-year-old has made a fortune tapping into Russians' thirst for consumer durables. According to Forbes, Yakovlev is worth almost $1.5 billion.

He founded the business with his brother Oleg in 1994 and has created an empire which by the end of the year expects to have 1000 stores in 600 Russian towns, as well as 85 stores in neighbouring Ukraine.

Z In the 1980s, Boris and Mikhail Zingarevich were poorly paid mechanics in bureaucracy-ridden Soviet-era pulp and paper mills. Today they have at least $1 billion between them according to Forbes, and sit on the board of Russia's biggest forestry enterprise, the St Petersburg-based Ilim Pulp.

They are both 46 but it is not known whether they are twins or were merely born in the same year, or even whether they are married or have children. It is known that business-wise Boris has been the more active. The duo founded Ilim Pulp in 1992 with one other partner after working their way up through the hierarchy of various pulp mills. Today Ilim is one of the world's biggest timber firms, and the brothers comprise half of the company's board.

- INDEPENDENT