Oligarch

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An oligarch (from the Greek : ὀλίγοι oligoi = "few" and ἄρχων archon = "ruler, leader") is an economic magnate or tycoon who, through his wealth, exercises extensive power over a country or region for his sole benefit.

In the USA , during the economic boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term was applied to people who made their own rules in a region when there was a lack of representatives of the general legal order, for example in some cities in the west or in Alaska .

Russia

The Russian oligarchs are entrepreneurs who started their business during Gorbachev's period of market liberalization. The Russian oligarch is considered to be a nouveau riche who unscrupulously appropriated state property during the 1990s.

"Many (if not most) of today's oligarchs came from middle or lower classes and felt no qualms about picking up pieces of land or assets that used to belong to the state - without anyone quite knowing who owned what during the chaotic crisis."

"Many (if not all) of today's oligarchs come from the middle or lower classes and had no qualms about stealing land or possessions that previously belonged to the state - during the chaotic crisis nobody knew exactly who owned what."

- Lauren Goodrich

It is widely believed that there have been two generations of economic oligarchs in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union : the Yeltsin oligarchs and the Putin oligarchs.

Oligarchs of the Yeltsin era

Towards the end of the Soviet Union, during Gorbachev's perestroika , some Russian businessmen smuggled goods such as personal computers and jeans into the country and sold them on the black market at high profit. In the 1990s , during Boris Yeltsin's tenure, during Russia's transition to a market economy , the oligarchs emerged: well-connected entrepreneurs who started with almost nothing and got rich through market activities and through their connections with the corrupt, albeit democratically elected Russian government.

The oligarchs became extremely unpopular with the Russian public and are widely believed to be the cause of the economic chaos that reigned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Guardian described the oligarchs as "about as unpopular with the average Russian as someone who burns £ 50 bills for pleasure on the sidewalk outside an orphanage."

During Yeltsin's presidency, the oligarchs gained increasing influence in politics and played an important role in funding Yeltsin's re-election in 1996. With the help of inside knowledge of the government's financial decisions, the oligarchs found it easy to expand their holdings. However, the 1998 Russian financial crisis hit some of the oligarchs hard, and those whose fortunes were based on banking lost most of it.

The most influential and publicly present oligarchs of the Yeltsin era are Boris Berezovsky , Mikhail Khodorkovsky , Mikhail Fridman , Vladimir Gussinsky , Vitaly Malkin and Vladimir Potanin . Of them, only Fridman, Malkin and Potanin “saved themselves” into the Putin era. The others have been ousted by the government , according to a report by The Guardian .

Oligarchs of the Putin era

During Vladimir Putin's reign , several oligarchs came under fire for illegal activities, including violating tax law . However, it is widely believed that the allegations are politically motivated and that the business magnates have lost the government's favor. Vladimir Gussinsky ( Media-Most ) and Boris Berezovsky escaped justice by leaving Russia. The best-known oligarch at the time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky ( Yukos ), was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced to nine years in prison. In September 2011 the European Court of Human Rights classified his conviction as “not politically motivated”.

The billionaire, philanthropist and patron of the arts Alexander Lebedev criticized the (other) oligarchs: “I think that material wealth is a very emotional and spiritual thing for them. They spend a lot of their money on personal consumption. ”He describes them as a crowd of culturally uneducated people:“ They don't read books. You have no time. They don't go to exhibitions. They think the only way to impress others is by buying a yacht. ”Lebedev also notes that the oligarchs are disinterested in social injustices. Some of them now have only a few hundred million dollars left as a result of the global economic and credit crisis of 2008 and have thus arrived in the poor district by the standards of the super-rich.

Ivan Rybkin , the former State Duma spokesman , claimed that President Vladimir Putin was a billionaire and "the largest oligarch in Russia". Russian officials strongly disagreed with Rybkin's view, saying Rybkin had provided no evidence to support his testimony. Putin himself also denies this accusation.

Some observers believe that Putin built a state-run economy to dismantle the empires of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs. The Texan business intelligence company STRATFOR took this point of view. To this end, Putin positioned some of the most trustworthy and useful oligarchs right below himself in the Kremlin.

The most important oligarchs of the Putin era include Roman Abramowitsch , Oleg Deripaska , Mikhail Prokhorov and, as before, Vladimir Potanin , Vitali Malkin , Mikhail Fridman and the Arkadi and Boris Rotenberg brothers .

2008 global recession and credit crunch

Since July 2008, the 25 richest Russians have lost a combined $ 230 billion , according to Bloomberg LP . The decline of the oligarchs is closely linked to the slump in the Russian stock market, where the RTS index fell 71% as a result of capital flight after the Caucasus conflict in 2008 .

Billionaires in Russia and Ukraine have been hit particularly hard by creditors demanding repayment of balloon loans in an effort to boost their balance sheets . Many oligarchs had taken out large loans from Russian banks, bought stocks and used them as collateral to obtain further loans from Western banks.

One of the first to be hit by the global downturn was Oleg Deripaska, Russia's richest person at the time, whose net worth in March 2008 was $ 28 billion. When Deripaska borrowed money from Western banks, which he secured with his company stakes, the fall in the shares forced him to sell shares in order to meet additional demands.

Ukraine

Role of oligarchs

The Ukrainian oligarchs came into the spotlight of the international public on the occasion of the European Football Championship 2012 : Rinat Akhmetov as owner of the Shakhtar Donetsk club in Donetsk and as the builder of its arena, Oleksandr Yaroslavskyj , the "King of Kharkiv ", in a similar position at Metalist Kharkiv and its Metalist stadium , as well as the brothers Hryhorij Surkis and Ihor Surkis , the former also serving as President of the Ukrainian Football Association (FFU), while his younger brother is President of the Ukrainian football club Dynamo Kiev in the capital Kiev . According to some analyzes in the media, until the political upheavals that began in 2013, the oligarchs in eastern Ukraine , such as the Akhmetov clan, tended towards the "blue", more pro-Russia party of former President Viktor Yanukovych , those in western Ukraine such as B. the Pinschuk clan to the pro-Western "orange" side of his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko and the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko . The support and coalitions of the oligarchs also changed depending on the business interests, especially since the oligarchs' companies are already internationally and not only regionally present. According to Klaus Müller (AGH Scientific and Technical University of Krakow), a simple east-west scheme does not meet reality, as there are no constant camps due to the prevailing opportunism among the oligarchs.

Origin of the oligarchy

The dominant oligarchs emerged during Ukraine's transition from a Soviet republic to independence in the 1990s. In the first phase mainly commercial and financial transactions were carried out, which were supported by the state through tolerance of illegal measures, state contracts and cheap loans. The profits were used for the manipulated acquisition of state-owned companies and the takeover of companies from debtors through bankruptcy proceedings approved by the state. The holdings created in this way in the profitable economic sectors of Ukraine continued to depend on the goodwill of the state. The upswing in the late 1990s led to the rapid growth of some holdings and the expansion of their operations into the global market. After the phase of cooperation between entrepreneurs and the political elite, entrepreneurs began to exert greater political influence themselves in the mid-1990s: by buying up the mass media, regional clusters and taking over political offices.

In the first five years of the transformation, half of the state-owned companies went into private ownership and the Ukrainian economy was subdivided into three major "clans" of the 1990s, both territorially and sectorally. In the following years they also achieved a position of power outside these regions: at the end of Kuchma's term in office in January 2005, they were in charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Energy, the Central Bank, the National Security and Defense Council and the Customs Authority. In 2014, the Ukrainian interim president Oleksandr Turchynov appointed the two big businessmen and politicians Serhij Taruta and Ihor Kolomoyskyj as governors of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk respectively.

List of Ukrainian billionaires

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Ukrainian billionaires 2013-14. As a result of the conflict in Ukraine , the wealth of several oligarchs fell below one billion US dollars.

Rank according to Forbes
Billionaire
List (3/2014) 		Rank in Ukraine
's wealthiest
top 100 list
(Correspondent, 2013) 		Surname Net worth
(Forbes, USD billion ) 		Total assets
(correspondent, USD
billion ) 		Age
(3/2014) 		Main lines of business, the
property consists of		 Sources,
more information etc.
100 1 Rinat Akhmetov 11.6 18.3 47 coal and steel
580 4th Viktor Pinchuk 3.0 2.98 53 Steel pipes and others
868 2 Hennadij Boholjubow 2.1 3.9 52 Banking and investment
1009 3 Ihor Kolomoysky 1.8 3.5 51 Banking and investment
1203 5 Wadim Nowinski
1.5 2.8 50 steel
1329 12 Yuri Kozyuk 1.3 1.1 45 Agriculture
1348 13 Petro Poroshenko 1.3 1.0 48 Confectionery, media, shipbuilding and others
1468 11 Kostjantyn Shevaho
1.1 1.2 40 Mining
1579 27 Serhiy Tihipko 1.0 0.458 54 Banking, agriculture
- 6th Viktor Nusenkis
 - 2.5 59 (2013) Metallurgy, coal industry
- 7th Serhiy Kurchenko - 2.4 28 (2013) gas
- 8th Dmytro Firtash - 2.3 48 (2013) Energy, finance and real estate, agriculture
- 9 Oleg Bachmatyuk - 1.4 39 (2013) Agro, mining and chemical industries
- 10 Aleksey Martynov
 - 1.3 47 (2013) Metallurgy, energy

In eastern Ukraine, oligarchs (more precisely: their “political celebrities”) have also played a role in the war since 2014 . For example, the Russian Igor Girkin (fighting name "Strelkow"), who later became defense minister of the " Donetsk People's Republic ", was formerly the security chief of the nationalist Russian oligarch Konstantin Valeryevich Malofeev , whose former PR advisor Alexander Borodai even became Prime Minister of the People's Republic.

Web links

Wiktionary: Oligarch  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ STRATFOR: 107646 Rusagro Interim Report , June 3, 2010
  2. ↑ Profiles: Boris Berezovsky BBC Retrieved on November 9, 2009
  3. ↑ What a carve-up! The Guardian. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2009
  4. ↑ The Russian Oligarchs of the 1990's: Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky, Vladimir Vinogradov . sjsu.edu. Retrieved June 19, 2011.
  5. ^ Billionaires boom as Putin puts oligarchs at N2 in global rich list The Guardian, 19 Feb 2008
  6. ↑ CASE OF KHODORKOVSKIY v. RUSSIA (Application no. 5829/04) , JUDGMENT, STRASBOURG, May 31, 2011
  7. ↑ Stern: Yukos Trial: European Court of Justice Gives Russia Law , September 20, 2011
  8. ↑ a b c Twilight of the oligarchs as credit crisis hits Russia | World news | The Guardian
  9. ↑ "Что касается различных слухов по поводу денежного состояния, я смотрел некоторые бумажки на этот счёт: просто болтовня, которую нечего обсуждать, просто чушь. Все выковыряли из носа и размазали по своим бумажкам. Вот так я к этому и отношусь. “The President's annual press conference for the Russian and foreign media ( Memento of July 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), February 14, 2008, Kremlin.ru
  10. ↑ STRATFOR: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs , May 22, 2009
  11. ^ Conflict in Georgia May Raise Pressure on Russia's Oligarchs - NYTimes.com
  12. ↑ a b Margin Calls Ignite Billionaire Fire Sale - Forbes.com ( Memento from October 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ See Roland Zorn: Background article in the FAZ of June 9, 2012
  14. ↑ a b c d The Clans of Ukraine - Power Relations in a Democracy That Never Existed , Le Monde Diplomatique October 10, 2014
  15. ↑ http://www.laender-analysen.de/ukraine/pdf/UkraineAnalysen40.pdf
  16. ↑ 2015 only five Ukrainians in the Forbes billionaires list , March 2, 2015
  17. ↑ a b c d Forbes
  18. ↑ a b Correspondent  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / files.korrespondent.net
  19. ↑ a b Viktor Nusenkis ( memento of October 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Korrenpondent, korrespondent.net
  20. ↑ Viktor Nusenkis , 2013, Forbes-ru, forbes.ru
  21. ↑ a b Sergei Kurtšenko ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Korrenpondent, korrespondent.net
  22. ↑ Sergei Kurtšenko , Forbes-et al
  23. ↑ a b Oleg Bahmatjuk ( memento of October 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Korrenpondent, korrespondent.net
  24. ↑ Oleg Bahmatjuk Selite: Forbes-UA arvioi April 18, 2014 omaisuudeksi 0.609 billion USD
  25. ↑ a b Aleksei Martynov ( Memento from November 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Korrenpondent, korrespondent.net
  26. ↑ Aleksei Martynov Selite: Forbes-UA arvioi April 18, 2014 omaisuudeksi 0.504 billion USD
  27. ↑ Julian Hans: Russian secret service agent for Eastern Ukraine - "I pressed the trigger for the war" . sueddeutsche.de, November 21, 2014, accessed on November 22, 2014 .
  28. ↑ The Orthodox Knight in the Service of the Kremlin , in: Die Welt, July 24, 2014, accessed on March 19, 2015