Tuesday 1 April 2008

Russian Window Cleaner Cleans Up!


Mikhail Fridman, 43, is married with two children and has a net worth of US$20.8 billion. He is ranked 20 on 2008 Forbes rich list. He started life as a window washer and later founded Alfa Group in 1990s with college friends and now fellow billionaires. The group is a conglomerate with oil, retail, telecom and banking interests. Altimo is the charity arm of Alfa Group and specialises in telecommunications investments in Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States and Asia. Its asset portfolio is worth $30 billion. He is an astonishingly nice man in conversation - a youthful 38, and by far the most diffident and least sinister figure among the 20 or so tycoons who dominate Russian big business. His latest deal has brought him a star quality even within that elite: his Alfa group and its partners have just sold half an oil company to BP for $6.75bn, the biggest investment in Russia ever by a foreign company. Window-cleaning and small trading yielded the capital for a commodity business and the start-up of Alfa Bank, now the largest private bank in Russia.

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