Modules
Biography
Alexei Kuzmichev cofounded Alfa Group -- including Alfa Bank, and LetterOne -- with college friends Mikhail Fridman and German Khan.
He and his partners sold their 25% in joint venture TNK-BP for $14 billion in 2013.
Fridman, Khan and Kuzmichev were all sanctioned by the EU and U.K. in February and March 2022. Alfa Bank was sanctioned by US in April.
Kuzmichev stepped down from LetterOne's board in March
Two of Kuzmichev's yachts were frozen by French authorities in March.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Alexei Kuzmichev
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 Alexei Kuzmichev, linked to Energy and 'Oil, banking, telecom', 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 59 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 3.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.