The fortunes of Russia’s richest people have fallen by $ 32 billion this year, and rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine are likely to increase their fortune losses, according to Bloomberg.
U.S. President Joe Biden announced sanctions on Tuesday targeting the sale of government bonds abroad and to Russia’s elite, and said he was sending an unspecified number of U.S. troops to the Baltic in a defense of NATO countries. .
Gennady Timchenko tops the list of Russian billionaires who have seen their fortunes shrink, with almost a third of their fortunes disappearing this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a list of the world’s 500 richest people.
Timchenko, 69, the son of a Soviet officer who befriended Russian President Vladimir Putin in the early 1990s, now owns about $ 16 billion, with most of his fortune coming from his Russian stake. gas company Novatek, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, the fortune of Leonid Mikhelson, also a shareholder, has fallen by $ 6.2 billion this year, while the fortune of Lukoil chairman Vagit Alekperov has fallen by about $ 3.5 billion over the same period. of the energy company has fallen by almost 17%.
Russia’s 23 billionaires now have a net worth of $ 343 billion, up from $ 375 billion at the end of last year.
Markets have been declining this week, following Putin’s recognition of the two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine – the “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” – as a result of Germany freezing Nord Stream 2 certification and The United Kingdom to impose sanctions on five banks in the country and on three members of the Russian elite, including Timchenko.
The UK sanctions list also includes 65-year-old Boris Rotenberg and his 48-year-old nephew Igor, whose families made their fortunes through the gas pipeline company Stroygazmontazh.
Igor’s father, Arkady, one of Putin’s former judo partners, sold the pipeline company in 2019 for about $ 1.3 billion. He bought a minority stake in Boris’s younger brother five years earlier, when both brothers and Timchenko were hit by US sanctions on Russian annexation of Crimea.
It is noted in the meantime that earlier today it announced sanctions in Russia and the European Union.
In addition, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Tuesday that he would not meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov this week because “it does not make sense”, given Russia’s moves in Ukraine.
Source: Capital

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