Modules
Biography
Vladimir Yevtushenkov is a cofounder of AFK Sistema, which has investments in Russia's largest cellular operator MTS, online retailer Ozon and healthcare chain Medsi.
Yevtushenkov was hit by sanctions in April 2022 and transferred 10% of his stake in AFK Sistema to his son; Forbes still credits him with his remaining 49% stake in the company.
In 2014, AFK Sistema was accused of illegally acquiring a controlling stake in oil firm Bashneft. The shares were returned and sold to state-owned Rosneft.
In 2023 the company, through its Cosmos Hotel Group, acquired ten Radisson and Park Inn hotels for just 200 million euros from Norway's Wenaas Hotel Russia, which left the Russian market.
AFK Sistema was founded in 1993.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Vladimir Yevtushenkov
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 Vladimir Yevtushenkov, linked to Telecom and 'Telecom, 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.