You're reading: #21 Richest: Anatoliy Yurkevych, 42

$589 million Married with two sons and one daughter Interests: agribusiness

As Ukraine’s fourth-largest dairy producer, Anatoliy Yurkevych had the nerves and wits to wait for a better deal when the first one came around.

When Ukraine’s dairy production was down 5 percent in 2009, Focus magazine reported that Yurkevych was engaged in talks to sell a 25 percent stake in his diversified Milkiland dairy company for around $40 million to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
Apparently, negotiations went nowhere despite the company needing liquidity to operate new acquisitions.

Everything in life is relative. Tomorrow an accident can happen, politics can change, and everything can change completely.”

-Anatoliy Yurkevych.

Nonetheless, Milkiland on Dec. 6 became the latest company to go public this year selling 22 percent of its shares on the Warsaw stock exchange, raising $78 million.

In addition, the company said it wants to take over a Russian cheese factory and modernize currently-owned facilities.

Waiting games, it seems, have served Yurkevych well. He still has interests in Bankomsvyaz, which started off in 1992 in the import-export business but now is an information technology company.

Bankomsvyaz imported everything from juice to canned fish and exported machine-building equipment through barter deals.

Yurkevych is also a board member of a commercial and residential real estate development company and has interests in six supermarkets.

He entered the dairy business in the late 1990s but soon got ahead of himself after purchasing assets without having enough operating cash to run Milkiland.

So how does he feel about his net worth?

“Everything in life is relative,” he told Delo newspaper when the world economic crisis hit in 2008. “Tomorrow an accident can happen, politics can change, and everything can change completely.”