Oligarch Profiles

Igor Kesaev made his fortune in cigarette distribution. His Mercury Group built Megapolis, Russia’s leading tobacco distributor, and later moved into retail. He also held a large stake in the Degtyarev Plant, a Russian weapons manufacturer. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States have sanctioned him. The EU’s General Court

Gennady Timchenko is a businessman with Russian, Finnish and Armenian citizenship. He made his fortune in oil trading as co-founder of Gunvor and holds large stakes in the gas producer Novatek and the petrochemical company Sibur through his investment group, Volga Group. He has known Vladimir Putin since the 1990s; Putin has called him a

Eugene Shvidler is a businessman and a longtime friend and business partner of Roman Abramovich. He was president of the oil company Sibneft from 1998 to 2005 and sat on the board of the steel and mining group Evraz from 2011 to March 2022. He left the Soviet Union in 1989 and holds British and

Dmitry Pumpyansky built the Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK), a Russian maker of steel pipes for the oil and gas industry, and was president of Sinara Group. In March 2022, as the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and Switzerland sanctioned him, he gave up his posts and his status as beneficial owner of both groups.

Arkady Rotenberg is a former judo coach who trained in the same Leningrad judo group as Vladimir Putin in the 1960s and became a major contractor for the Russian state. His company Stroygazmontazh (SGM) built pipelines for Gazprom and the bridge across the Kerch Strait to annexed Crimea, and he co-owned the SMP Bank with

Andrei Komarov is a Russian industrialist who built up the Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant group, known as ChelPipe, and sold his controlling stake to the rival pipe maker TMK in March 2021. From 2005 he represented the Chelyabinsk region in Russia’s Federation Council. In 2014 he was arrested in a commercial bribery case that, according

Igor Rybakov is a Russian entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 1992 he co-founded TechnoNICOL, a producer of roofing, waterproofing and insulation materials, with his university friend Sergei Kolesnikov. He stepped back from running the company in 2015 and has since focused on investing and on the Rybakov Foundation, which he set up with his wife Ekaterina.

Eugene Kaspersky is a Russian software entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive of the cybersecurity company Kaspersky, known until 2019 as Kaspersky Lab. He trained at the KGB’s higher school in the 1980s, a fact he has acknowledged, and has repeatedly denied that his company works for the Russian state. The United States banned

Boris Rotenberg is a Russian businessman and sports official, and the younger brother of Arkady Rotenberg. A former judo coach, he co-founded SMP Bank with his brother in 2001 and became a co-owner of the pipeline builder Stroygazmontazh (SGM). Today he owns the football club FC Sochi and heads the Russian Automobile Federation. He has

Vladimir Potanin is the president of Norilsk Nickel (Nornickel), the world’s largest producer of palladium, and the founder of the holding company Interros, which is the company’s largest shareholder. In the 1990s he was one of the architects of the loans-for-shares auctions under President Boris Yeltsin, through which his bank won control of Norilsk Nickel.