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Biography
Michel Litvak derives his fortune from OTEKO, a Moscow-based investor with interests in port and industrial infrastructure in southern Russia.
He started out trading consumer goods between Russia and China in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1992 he entered the oil railroad business and founded OTEKO, then a major railroad operator.
In 2018 Litvak sold the railroad business, and has focused on expanding his port and infrastructure companies.
Through his business Litvak owns two seaport terminals on the Black Sea coast: LPG Transshipment Complex and Taman Bulk Cargo Terminal.
Born in Leningrad, Litvak's parents were Russian Jews. In the 1960s his family left the Soviet Union and immigrated to Belgium; he now holds dual citizenship in Russia and Belgium.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Michel Litvak
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 Michel Litvak, linked to Logistics and 'Seaport', 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 10 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 0.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.