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Biography
Mikhail Fridman, cofounder of Alfa Bank, Russia's largest non-state bank, was hit with sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Soon after, Fridman (who also has Israeli citizenship) stepped down from his Luxembourg holding company, LetterOne, and reduced his shareholding.
Fridman's properties in London, including the $100 million Victorian-era Athlone House estate, have been frozen by the U.K.
A Ukraine native, Fridman and his college buddies German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev started commodities trader Alfa-Eco in 1989.
Thanks to Kremlin connections, Fridman and his partners were able to create a joint venture with British Petroleum, TNK-BP, in 2003.
In 2013 he got $5.1 billion in cash when the trio and partners sold their TNK-BP stakes for $14 billion
In August 2023, Ukraine opened a criminal case against Fridman related to fraud charges stemming from Alfa Bank Ukraine. In December he was put on the international wanted list.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Mikhail Fridman
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 Mikhail Fridman, 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 117 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 7.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.