Viktor Vekselberg

Viktor Felixovich Vekselberg (Виктор Феликсович Вексельберг, Віктор Феліксович Вексельберг; born April 14, 1957) is a Ukrainian-born Russian-Israeli-Cypriot oligarch, billionaire, and businessman.

He is the owner and president of Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate.

According to Forbes, as of November 2021, his fortune is estimated at $9.3 billion, making him the 262nd richest person in the world.

Viktor Vekselberg was born in 1957 to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Russian mother in Drohobych, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (although some reports state that he was born in Lviv).

All of Vekselberg’s family of seventeen fell victims to the Holocaust.

They were murdered and buried in a mass grave during the Nazi repressions in Drohobych, Western Ukraine.

Only Vekselberg’s father and his cousin survived the massacre.

Vekselberg’s father had gone off to war, while his neighbors hid his cousin in a pit-house for almost four years.

At the end of the war, she managed to flee to the territory that was controlled by the U.S. troops and later she moved to the U.S. Andrew Intrater is Vekselberg's cousin.

In 1979, he graduated from the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering.

After that, he worked as a researcher and headed the laboratory of the Design Bureau for rodless pumps "Konnas".

In 1988, after the Gorbachev administration relaxed restrictions on private business as part of its new policy Perestroika and Glasnost, Vekselberg founded company Komvek, and in 1990, he co-founded Renova Group with college classmates, Leonard Blavatnik and Vladimir Balaeskoul (later, they both sold their stakes in Renova to Vekselberg).

In the mid-1990s, Vekselberg and Blavatnik embarked on accumulating interests in aluminium smelters.

The two partners recommissioned production at Irkutsk Aluminium Plant which had been previously suspended.

In 1996, they co-founded Siberian-Urals Aluminium Company (SUAL) by merging of Ural and Irkutsk Aluminium Plants into Russia’s first aluminium holding company.

(SUAL would later merge with Russian Aluminium of Oleg Deripaska and alumina assets of Glencore to create United Company RUSAL, the world’s largest aluminium company).

In 1997, Alfa Group (owned by Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, and Alexei Kuzmichev) created with Vekselberg and Blavatnik a partnership for the acquisition of an interest in Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) that later became one of Russia's largest oil and gas companies.

In order to jointly hold oil assets, Alfa Group, Access Industries (a company owned by Blavatnik) and Vekselberg’s Renova established AAR consortium.

In the 2000’s, TNK-BP was the third oil & gas company in Russia.

Among other things, TNK-BP considered construction of a gas pipeline from the Kovykta gas condensate field through Mongolia to China and South Korea.

Also, the original plan also envisaged the possibility to build up a large helium production facility on the basis of Sayanskkhimplast plant to export helium to Asia-Pacific markets.

As from 2001, SUAL initiated several social and economic partnerships between its aluminium smelters and local municipalities in the regions of their presence.

Moreover, SUAL set up a lifetime pension plan for World War II veterans who used to work at the plants that became part of SUAL.

In 2002, SUAL constructed the first private railway in Russia to connect a bauxite mine in the Komi Republic with Ural Aluminium Plant through Trans-Siberian Railroad.

SUAL was the first major Russian company to pursue a consistent social policy in regions, offering support to local communities and small entrepreneurs.

In 2003, AAR and British Petroleum (a British-American company then) merged their Russian oil assets in a 50-50 joint venture named TNK-BP, and that was the largest private transaction in Russian history.

Acting as the chairman of the executive board of TNK, Vekselberg was instrumental in negotiating and closing the transaction.

Vekselberg’s indirect participation in TNK-BP amounted to 12.5%.

In 2006, Renova Group decided to diversify its business and divest form oil and gas sector to expand its footprint in manufacturing, hi-tech, and renewable energy.

In 2007, Standard & Poor's assigned a 'BB' long-term corporate credit rating to Renova Holding Ltd. and that spoke for the Group’s significant progress in portfolio diversification and liquidity improvement.

After divesting from the oil & gas sector, Vekselberg focused on the renewable energy, transport infrastructure, manufacturing, and IoT.

Vekselberg became a pioneer in the Russian solar power sector.

In 2008, Vekselberg proxied a deal between Russian and Hungarian governments, buying the former embassy building from Hungary for $21m and immediately selling it to the Russian government for $116m, while the market price of the building was estimated at $50m.

Investigation of the paper trail by Alexey Navalny and the Rospil project has found several invalid and backdated documents, thus suggesting a collusion (e.g. the tender held by the Hungarian side was totally fictive, as the building was already sold by that time).

Hungarian officials responsible for the deal (Tátrai Miklós, Marta Horvathne Fekszi and Arpad Szekely) were detained in February 2011.

In the middle of 2012, BP started talks with the state oil company Rosneft with a view to selling BP’s 50% stake in TNK-BP.

Rosneft finalised preliminary approval of a comprehensive deal in early 2013, offering to buy out TNK-BP in its entirety - AAR received cash consideration for its stake, BP received cash and Rosneft shares.

On the Russian side, a criminal investigation was only started in August 2013.

In 2017, Vekselberg inaugurated Platov International Airport in Rostov-on-Don, the first greenfield airport built in Russia after the collapse of the USSR.

In 2019, Gagarin International Airport, the second greenfield airport, was put in operation in Saratov.