Modules
Biography
Alexander Ponomarenko was chairman of the board of Sheremetyevo, the biggest airport in Russia.
Ponomarenko was sanctioned by the EU. the U.K. and the U.S. in 2022; he has disputed the sanctions.
Ponomarenko and partner Alexander Skorobogatko started out with sea ports and banking and then moved into airport construction.
In 2013 the two, with Arkady Rotenberg, a judo partner of President Vladimir Putin, won a tender to develop Sheremetyevo, the state-owned airport.
The partners and Rotenberg also founded TPS Real Estate, which owns more than half of the real estate in Ocean Plaza, Kiev's biggest shopping center.
In 2023 the center was seized by the Ukrainian government.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Alexander Ponomarenko
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Alexander Ponomarenko, linked to Logistics and 'Real estate, airport', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 16 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.