From poor orphan to billionaire oligarch: how Abramovich made his money
Roman Abramovich’s journey from an impoverished, orphaned childhood to Chelsea-owning billionaire was forged in the chaotic transformation of Russia itself, in the years after the iron curtain fell.
His elevation into an oligarch is unusually well documented, chronicled in painstaking detail in an English high court judgment of Lady Justice Gloster in 2012, when Abramovich succeeded in defending a lawsuit brought by his former mentor, Boris Berezovsky.
In the case, both men described their careers, and routes to becoming billionaires, as “a uniquely Russian story”.
Born in 1966, Abramovich lost both his parents by the time he was three, and he was brought up by relatives in the Komi republic, in Russia’s freezing north. After a brief period in the army, he studied as an engineer, and worked first as a mechanic.
In Russia’s perestroika period, when economic liberalisation allowed for small businesses, Abramovich ran a children’s toy manufacturer, famously selling plastic ducks from his Moscow apartment.
After communism fell, he worked his way up in trading and transportation of oil and other industrial products. The court judgment records that at the time of his first, transformational meeting with Berezovsky, on a Caribbean cruise in December 1994, Abramovich was “a moderately successful businessman”.
The creation of the vast state oil concern Sibneft, whose formation and sale to Abramovich made his fortune, was an idea he conceived and suggested to Berezovsky, the court judgment noted.
Already rich from his dealings in the automotive sector, and politically connected, Berezovsky was the ideal business partner for Abramovich. Obsessed with opposing any prospect of Russia returning to communism, Berezovsky proposed Abramovich’s
Read more on theguardian.com
