Andrey Melnichenko
Source of wealth: Fertilizers, coal
...
...
Modules
Biography
Andrey Melnichenko is the founder of fertilizer producer Eurochem and coal energy company SUEK.
The son of a Soviet physicist, Melnichenko dropped out of college when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 to start a chain of currency exchange booths.
Two years later, he founded MDM Bank, which became one of Russia's most successful private banks.
Melnichenko's companies, which employ more than 100,000, have invested some $23 billion into fertilizer and coal production over the past 15 years.
Melnichenko was sanctioned by the EU and UK in March 2022, and by the US in August 2022; he called the sanctions "absurd and nonsensical" and is disputing them.
In 2022 Melnichenko's wife, Alexandra, became the beneficiary of a trust that holds stakes in Eurochem and SUEK.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Andrey Melnichenko
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 Andrey Melnichenko, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Fertilizers, coal', 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 145 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 9.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.