Evgeny (Eugene) Shvidler
Source of wealth: Metals, investments
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Biography
Evgeny Shvidler, who became an American citizen in 1994, is the best friend and a partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
His core asset is stake in Russian steelmaker Evraz.
Former Executive chairman of Highland Gold Mining, Shvidler sold his 12% stake in this company in 2020.
Shvidler was born in Moscow, Russia. He got an MBA from Fordham University in 1992 and worked for Deloitte & Touche in New York.
Shvidler, a dual British-American citizen, was sanctioned by the U.K. in March 2022. His two jets were detained by British authorities. He filed the claim in 2023 in London to challenge the sanctions.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Evgeny (Eugene) Shvidler
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 Evgeny (Eugene) Shvidler, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Metals, investments', 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 11 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.