Page 44 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

44 I Eastern Europe bne March 2018
The long-anticipated 'Kremlin Report' by the US Department of Treasury names oligarchs and top officials.
US includes 210 tycoons, CEOs and officials
in 'Kremlin Report'
of Severstal steel mill, who is worth $17.5bn and is widely respected as being simply a good businessman and doesn't rely on the Kremlin for his fortune.
He is followed by Vladimir Lisin,
owner of Novolipetsk Meatllurgical Kombinat (NLMK), another steel mill and another clean and respectable businessman.
Indeed, the first really dubious name on the Forbes list is Gennady Timchenko at number four who is worth $16bn and
is the first stoligarch, the businessmen who owe their fortunes almost entirely to Putin’s personal patronage.
Other men high up on the list are well known for being no friends of Putin. Vagit Alekperov, the owner of Russia’s largest independent oil producer Lukoil, who is worth $14.5bn and is at six on the list,
is terrified of being attacked and taken over by the Kremlin, according to bne Intellinews sources in the company. And Mikhail Fridman, the owner of the Alfa Group and worth $14.4bn, has left Russia despite being explicitly and publicly told by Putin to keep his money and invest it at home. Fridman is no angel but he is no friend of Putin’s either.
However, despite previous concerns no immediate sanctions are being intro- duced, in what is currently more of a
bne IntelliNews
The long-anticipated 'Kremlin Report' by the US Department of Treasury includes 210 names of Russia's richest tycoons, officials close to President Vladimir Putin, and CEOs of large state corporations, but no sanc- tions on any of these people are actually imposed.
96 people on the list are from the business community with a net worth of more than $1bn each and are now Kremlin-linked by the report so potentially marked for US sanctions. The report also lists almost the entire top tier of Russia's political class.
The list was met with bemusement in Moscow as the list of oligarchs almost exactly matches last year’s Russian Forbes magazine rich list of Russian busi- nessmen worth more than $1bn.
The wholesale copying of the rich lists belies the point of the report, which was to identify those oligarchs that had made their money thanks to their close connections to Putin rather than simply a list of the top businessmen.
www.bne.eu
“To determine the list of oligarchs, the Department of the Treasury enumerated those individuals who, according to reli- able public sources, have an estimated net worth of $1 billion or more. Those indi-
“The first really dubious name on the Forbes list is Gennady Timchenko at number four”
viduals who meet this criterion are listed in Appendix 2 of this report,” the Depart- ment of the Treasury said in its report. Taking this blunderbuss approach means many well respected Russian business- men have been caught up in the list that will likely impair their ability to raise money abroad.
At the top of the Forbes list is Leonid Mikhelson, the owner of independent gas producer Novatek, who is worth $18.4bn and certainly could not operate or be successful without the patronage of the Kremlin. But second on the
list is Alexey Mordashov, the owner
name and shame exercise. Moreover, there is a classified part of the list that was not released that reportedly con- tains more details of each man’s wealth and their personal connections to Putin.
The CEO of Russia's largest bank German Gref, the head of Russia's largest oil company Rosneft, Igor Sechin, the head of Russia's gas giant Gazprom, Alexei Miller, the head of Russia's second-largest state controlled bank, Andrei Kostin of VTB, are among the state-affiliated top managers listed.
Here too there is a contrast. Sberbank has