Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Net Worth: $2.2 billion

Age: 48

Marital status: Married, two daughter

Last year: $8.8 billion

Industry: Metallurgy, finance, mass media

Viktor Pinchuk’s holding company EastOne and Russia’s biggest retailer Mosmart had to wind up a project to build a chain of over 500 food stores in Ukraine. The proposed sum to be invested was $300 million, but the crisis put an end to the billionaire’s plans. It wasn’t the Ukrainians who backed down, but the Russians. The food store project is not on the scrap heap, but just on the backburner until better times. Despite the fact that business is languishing, Pinchuk’s philanthropic activity hasn’t slowed down. At the end of April 2009, he put on an exhibition of works by the most famous and expensive contemporary artist, Damien Hirst, at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. An even flashier charitable act saw Somali pirates receive $3.2 million on Feb. 4 as a ransom for Ukrainian sailors who had been held captive for six months. “There is no article in the budget ‘money for freeing hostages,’” explained Victor Baloha, then head of the Presidential Secretariat. “The lion’s share of the money for freeing the Ukrainian sailors was put up by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. They were his private funds.”

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