The 'most clever oligarch'

Len Blavatnik severed his $37 billion fortune from Russian roots.

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Blavatnik speaks with former US President Bill Clinton at a gala at Lincoln Center in New York, in 2013. Photographer: Amanda Gordon Len Blavatnik calls himself foremost a self-made billionaire. The Ukraine-born British-American, by his own telling, is also a media mogul, a tech titan, a pioneering real estate investor and an industrialist. But above all, what Blavatnik has always strived to make clear: He has no connections to Vladimir Putin or Russian politics, and he absolutely should not be described as an oligarch. He's not even Russian. Despite his long tradition of distancing himself from Russia, he seeded his massive fortune with winnings from the so-called "aluminum wars" and Siberian oilfields. What's more, he made some of those billions alongside a consortium of Russian billionaires who were sanctioned by the UK and EU shortly after Russian forces spilled over the border. Had things gone a bit differently, Blavatnik could have been sanctioned too. Instead, he has amassed the world's 33rd-largest fortune and quietly ingratiated himself into British and American high society.  Read The Big Take.

From today's story "The way he's diversified his businesses over time and sort of embedded himself in a different set of institutional contexts in the US and UK is clever... he may very well be the most clever oligarch of them all." David Lingelbach Professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Baltimore who headed Bank of America Corp.'s Russian operations in the 1990s

ICYMI Mikhail Fridman — one of Russia's original oligarchs — says that punishing billionaires like him shows a misunderstanding of power in Russia. Job cuts and a sour investment climate are hitting big tech companies, and may slam smaller ones as the damage spreads. In India, 90% of women have been shut out of the workforce. It's a problem with $6 trillion in consequences. Read more from The Big Take.

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