Rinat Akhmetov - Europe’s Champion
Net Worth: $31.1billion (June 2008)
Age: 41 years old
Marital status: Married, has two sons
Last year: $ 15.6 billion
Industry: Metallurgy, finances, coal, energy, telecommunications, food industry, mass media and other
The prophecy of Korrespondent is fulfilled. According to the estimates of investment company Dragon Capital, Rinat Akhmetov is the richest man on territory of the former USSR. A year ago, when Korrespondent put together a list of the richest Ukrainians last year, it predicted to the owner of Systems Capital Management (SCM) that he would outshine the rest of the rating members in this international nomination. Oleg Deripaska, the richest man in Russia, according to the latest Forbes rating, lags behind Donetsk multimillionaire, Akhmetov, in this unofficial USSR fortune championship, whereas the difference in wealth between the two is $1.5 billion.
Still, not a single Nostradamus could suppose that in the year of a global financial crisis and a crash of the world stock markets, Akhmetov would become the richest man in Europe.
In 2008 Akhmetov’s wealth surpassed the assets of the IKEA owner, Ingvar Kamprad, by more over $100 billion. Kamprad until recently was the wealthiest European. By the way last year, Kamprad lost $2 billion.
How did the current European wealth champion managed to double his assets for one year? Market. Capitalization of the power and telecommunication companies. price increase on raw materials (coal, iron or) and metallurgical complexes. “To a great extend, the growth of cost happened due to the merger of Metinvest and Smart group”, Andrey Bespyatov, investment expert from Dragon Capital said. “As a result SCM was able to attain the control over quite valuable assets in the mining industry, such as Ingulets mining and processing pomplex and Yuzhny mining and processing complex”.
However, apart from metallurgy and energy, Akhmetov has enough other assets that graw more expensive. It takes two and a half pages to write the list of companies, which enter into his business empire. The range of interests of the multimillionaire is impressive. There are 25 companies in the ore mining and smelting, in the energy sector there are – 12 companies, in the financial sector there are five, he has six mass media companies, four machine engineering factories, five beer-brewing, three joint-stock companies on clay production, one company in the telecommunications and one in the wholesale and retail sale of oil products.
All this capitalism is crowned by a football club “Shakhtar”, which does not bring many dividends. But it pleases the eye and thrills the soul of its president, and brought Akhmetov some golden medals of Championship of Ukraine.
In one of his interviews to Korrespondent devoted to the preparations for Euro 2012, Akhmetov said: “We should dress Ukraine in bran-new outfits”. Great idea. The thing is that there are not enough “suits” for everyone.
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