Modules
Biography
Igor Makarov is the founder of Itera, Russia's first independent gas company.
In the late 1990s, Itera was Russia's main exporter of gas from Turkmenistan, where Makarov was born.
In 2012 Itera entered into a joint venture with Rosneft, the state-controlled oil company; the next year, Rosneft bought out Itera for $2.9 billion.
Makarov was appointed as an energy adviser to the president of Turkmenistan in 2019.
Makarov renounced his Russian citizenship in 2023 and is a citizen of Cyprus
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Igor Makarov
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 Igor Makarov, linked to Energy and '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 17 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 1.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.