Petr Aven

Petr Olegovich Aven (also transliterated Pyotr Aven; Пëтр Олегович Авен; Latvian: Pjotrs Avens; born 16 March 1955) is a Russian oligarch, businessman, economist and politician who also holds Latvian citizenship.

Until March 2022 he headed Alfa-Bank, Russia's largest commercial bank.

In March 2022, he resigned from the board of directors at Alfa-Bank and LetterOne Group to help them avoid sanctions.

In 2023 he was named the 659th richest person in the world, with a net worth of around $4.2 billion.

Aven is a member of Russian leader Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

Aven has met with Putin regularly, including soon after the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

He is one of many Russian oligarchs named in the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, CAATSA.

In 2022, Aven was included in EU sanctions imposed in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He criticized the sanctions, alleging that they had been applied on a "spurious and unfounded basis," and filed a lawsuit in the European Court of Justice.

Aven was born in Moscow, his father, professor of computer science Oleg Aven, was half Latvian and half Russian, and his mother was from a Jewish family.

His paternal grandfather Janis Aven or Jānis Avens (lv) was a Latvian rifleman.

Petr Aven studied at Moscow Physics and Mathematics school №2.

He graduated from Moscow State University in 1977 and holds a PhD in economics (1980).

In the book Aven says that he has known Berezovsky since 1978 and was quite close to him: "It was Fridman and I who happened to be by Boris's bed after his attempted assassination in 1994, and it was our yacht that he chose to go after being discharged from hospital".

On 28 February 2022, the European Union blacklisted Aven and had all his assets frozen in relation to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

On 9 April 2022, the French Ministry of Culture seized a Pyotr Konchalovsky painting owned by Petr Aven, "Autoportrait" (1910), as part of the personal sanctions imposed on Aven in relation to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The canvas had been part of the "Icônes de l'Art Russe" exhibition of the late Morozov brothers' collection of artworks at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Aven is currently the subject of a UK investigation into the possible evasion of sanctions, with transfers totaling £3 million to the UK from Austria in February 2022 under scrutiny.

In May 2022 Aven's home was raided by officers from the National Crime Agency.

Nonetheless, Aven's legal team scored a victory of sorts in July 2022, when a judge ruled that some of the accounts used to fund expenses for Aven's London mansion could be unfrozen.

In late October 2022, Aven was granted living expenses of £60,000 by the UK Treasury, as well as a one-off payment of £388,000 to settle “pressing debts”, an award that drew condemnation from supporters of the UK sanctions regime.

Aven claimed the money was needed to meet his “basic needs” and those of his family.

Sanctioned by the UK government in 2022 in relation to Russo-Ukrainian War.

After graduation from university, Aven was a senior researcher at the All-Union Research Institute for Systems Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences and then spent time at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria (1989–1991).

Concerning Russian economic reform in the early 1990s, he and other reformer colleagues had consulted with foreign academics by 1990 on trying to find a new system.

When Boris Yeltsin became president, he appointed Aven with the task of making the ruble convertible and finding a solution to foreign debt.

Aven went on to become the Minister of Foreign Economic Relations for the Russian Federation (1991–1992), serving as Russia's representative to the Group of Seven and conducting a number of high-level trade and economic missions to Western capitals.

After leaving the government in December 1992, Aven became an adviser to the president of JSC "LogoVAZ" Boris Berezovsky and remained in this post until the end of 1993.

In 1993 he joined the Russia's Choice movement and was a candidate for State Duma.

In October 1994, Aven met Alfa Group's Mikhail Fridman, and soon became an Alfa-Bank shareholder serving as a member of the supervisory board of the Alfa Group Consortium.

From 1994 until June 2011, he served as the president of Alfa-Bank Russia.

Currently Aven is a member of the board of directors and chairman of the board of directors of ABH Holdings S.A. Aven is also chairman of the board of directors at AlfaStrakhovanie Group, co-chairman of the board of directors of CTC Media, Inc. In 2012, the Alfa Group together with Viktor Vekselberg of Renova Group and Leonard Blavatnik of Access Industries sold their aggregate 50% stake in TNK-BP to state-owned Rosneft for $28 billion.

In 2013, Aven joined the Board of LetterOne Group, an international investment business founded by Mikhail Fridman and focused on the telecoms, technology and energy sectors.

The L1 Group owns companies – and has equity investments in companies – with operations in 32 countries around the world.

LetterOne acquired assets from German utility business E. ON in October 2015, in a deal worth $1.6bn, that saw the Luxembourg-based group gain Norwegian oil and gas resources.

In the following month, LetterOne also announced their intention to deal with Brazilian telecoms company Oi SA, and boost their presence in the mobile phone sector there.

In 2015 Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh published Gaidar's Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation of Russia, drawing on their experience of the Russian Government and the former First Minister for the Economy, Yegor Gaidar.

In his review of the book, John Lloyd of the Financial Times called it "an illuminating study of the reformers who sought to revive Russia's post-Soviet economy."

In 2017 Petr Aven published The age of Berezovsky (also known as The time of Berezovsky), the book about life of famous Russian business oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

For it Aven interviewed many people who were familiar with Berezovsky, including Anatoly Chubais, Valentin Yumashev, Aleksandr Voloshin, Mikhail Fridman, Yuri Shefler and Demian Kudryavtsev.