Dmitry Rybolovlev

Dmitry Yevgenyevich Rybolovlev (Дмитрий Евгеньевич Рыболовлев, ; born 22 November 1966) is a Russian oligarch, billionaire businessman, and investor.

He entered the business world in 1990 after graduating from the Perm Medical Institute.

He worked as doctor before going into business.

As a doctor's income was no longer enough to comfortably support a family during the final years of the Soviet Union, he began his first business project, a small medical enterprise that served the workers of local factories he set up together with his father, a professor of medicine.

Rybolovlev earned his first million dollars by reselling products, which the factories used to pay for in services rather than cash as was then a common practice in Russia.

The violent nature of capital accumulation in early to mid-1990s Russia, including in the country's industrially developed regions like the Perm Krai, gave rise to violent criminals battling over control of companies and imposing "protection" fees on businesses.

In 1992, Rybolovlev went to Moscow to take a business course and received a brokerage license from the Russian Ministry of Finance, one of the first in Russian and the first in the Perm region, which permitted him to trade and deal with securities.

Upon his return to Perm, he founded a brokerage and investment company and started buying up shares of local enterprises such as Uralkali, Silvinit, Azot, Metafrax, and Solikamskbumprom.

In 1993 to 1995, Rybolovlev's portfolio included securities of Uralkali, Silvinit, Metafrax and Neftekhimik.

These companies jointly developed the Verkhnekamskoye potash deposit, one of the world's largest.

Refusing to cooperate with criminal gangs, Rybolovlev was forced to hire a bodyguard in 1993 before moving his family to safety in Switzerland in 1995.

He also assigned bodyguards to all the directors of his enterprises, with only one, Evgeny Panteleimonov, director of Neftekhimik, refusing to accept.

Together with Rybolovlev, he had insisted on stopping the supply of the company's products through a mafia-controlled straw firm, "Trade House FD".

That same year, Evgeny Panteleimonov was killed at the doorstep of his house.

In early 1994, Rybolovlev persuaded directors of these and some other enterprises to establish a bank, which he headed.

He later decided to concentrate on two assets, Uralkali and Silvinit, given that the Russian potash industry was underdeveloped at the time due to the lack of interest from investors, unlike in the oil and gas sectors.

Additionally, no one had been able to acquire controlling stakes in the industry's firms.

Rybolovlev became chairman of the Russian fertilizer producer Uralkali in 1995.

A local gangster, Oleg Lomakin, turned out to be the organizer of the murder and was detained in April 1996.

He accused Rybolovlev of being behind the murder, which led to Rybolovlev being arrested and spending 11 months in pretrial detention.

Lomakin eventually withdrew his testimony, and, together with two accomplices, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the murder of Panteleimonov.

The judge concluded that the gangsters had killed the director of the company for breaking off relations with "Trade House FD".

In 1997, Rybolovlev was acquitted by courts of law at three levels, including the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

In media reports, he stated that he was extorted in jail to sell the shares of his company in exchange for his freedom, but had refused.

Over the next 15 years, Rybolovlev focused on developing Uralkali and eventually built it into a major global enterprise.

According to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, by 2000 he had consolidated his controlling interest in the company and begun to reform and develop it.

While in 2000 the capitalization of Uralkali was around $15 million, in eight years it reached $20 billion.

While the overall market outlook for mineral fertilizers improved over this time, reforms made under Rybolovlev's leadership played an important role in transforming a Soviet era enterprise into a worldwide industry leader.

In 2000, Rybolovlev replaced the entire management of Uralkali, setting an increase in labor productivity as a key indicator, and as a result, it increased by 2.5 times in the period from 2000 to 2007.

Following this rapid growth throughout the early 2000s, in 2002 Uralkali built the Baltic Bulk Terminal in St. Petersburg port as its own transport hub, providing the company with a high-tech universal transshipment complex for mineral fertilizers, and thereby improving logistics capabilities.

In 2005, Uralkali and Belarusian potash producer Belaruskali combined their trade flows via a single trader, the Belarusian Potash Company (BPC).

There were plans to float Uralkali on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, but Rybolovlev canceled the listing after the order book had already been closed because he considered the company's valuation by investors to be unfairly low.

The decision turned out to be correct in many respects, since just a few days after the cancellation of the IPO, a major accident occurred at one of Uralkali's mines.

Uralkali's IPO finally went ahead in 2007, making it one of the most successful in the history of Russian business.

In 2010, he sold his majority share of Uralkali to three Kremlin-linked oligarchs for $6.5 billion.

As of 2021, Rybolovlev had a reported net worth of $6.7 billion, which ranked him 391st on Forbes's list of billionaires.

In 2011, he became the majority owner and President of Monaco's football club AS Monaco.

He is one of the alleged victims of Swiss art transporter Yves Bouvier as part of The Bouvier Affair.

His hobbies include sailing where his yachts named Skorpis race competitively winning the ClubSwan 50 World Championship and taking line honour in the 2021 Fastnet Race sailing his ClubSwan 125.

Dmitry Rybolovlev born in Russian family, in Perm. His parents worked at the department at the Perm State Medical University named after Academician E.A Wagner.