Suleiman Kerimov
Source of wealth: Gold
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Modules
Biography
Suleiman Kerimov, a native of Dagestan, has represented the republic in Russia's Federation Council since 2008. He was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018. The EU and UK sanctioned him in March 2022.
A trained economist, Kerimov made a career investing in distressed assets in Russia. He also made money on Sberbank and Gazprom shares.
After cashing out in 2007 he invested in global banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank right before the 2008 financial meltdown. He got margin calls and lost billions.
He recovered by betting on Polyus, Russia's biggest gold producer, purchased from billionaire Vladimir Potanin. He paid $1.3 billion for 37% of the shares, which have since increased more than 10-fold.
In 2015, to get around a law barring politicians from holding financial assets abroad, he gave shares in Polyus to his son Said. In the beginning of 2022, Kerimov's family owned 76% of Polyus.
Said Kerimov was sanctioned by EU and UK in April 2022, and transferred his stake in Polyus to Akhmet Palankoev , a former colleague of his father's and to the Islamic Organisations Support.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Suleiman Kerimov
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 Suleiman Kerimov, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Gold', 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 176 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 11.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.