Roman Abramovich

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman Abramovich paid roughly $100 million in 1995 for a stake in the Russian oil company Sibneft. He bought it in partnership with Boris Berezovsky, at a price far below what the asset was worth. A decade later, in 2005, he sold that same stake to the Russian government under Vladimir Putin for $13 billion.

  Abramovich is a Russian business oligarch and politician, born in 1966. He is also the former owner of Chelsea, the Premier League football club in London. Much of his fortune is held through a web of companies, and much of it is based in Jersey.

  How did a state asset change hands at such a low price, and who stood behind the deal? What did the money buy him, from football trophies to a regional governorship? And what has it cost him since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine?

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• 2. Orphan To Trader

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  Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich was born on the 24th of October 1966 in Saratov, then part of the Soviet Union. His mother, Irina, taught music and died of sepsis after an illegal abortion went wrong. He was one year old. His father, Aaron Abramovich Leibovich, worked in the economic council of the Komi ASSR. A collapsing crane crushed him to death when Roman was three.

  In late 1969, the orphaned boy was taken in by his maternal aunt Lyudmila and her husband, Uncle Leib, in Ukhta. The town lies near the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures fall to minus 30 degrees Celsius. Five people shared a three-room flat, including cousins Natalya and Ida, and the aunt and uncle slept on the sofa. Leib directed supplies at a local factory. One neighbour remembered a "polite and quiet boy, not rowdy like the others". Abramovich later said his childhood was not unhappy, because "as a child you cannot tell the difference". Even so, he considered Ukhta "too small" and always wanted to leave.

  Behind the orphan lay a family history shaped by the Second World War. On his mother's side, relatives who stayed in Kyiv were among the 33,771 Jews murdered at Babi Yar in September 1941. His mother, then aged three, had fled with her family to Saratov just before the Nazi invasion. On his father's side, the grandfather Nachman Leibovich was a merchant in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. In 1940 the Soviets branded him a "capitalist" and deported him to an NKVD camp in the settlement of Resheti. He died there in 1942.

  School No 2 in Ukhta was where Abramovich studied at the age of eight. The next year he went to live with another uncle near Moscow, returning to Ukhta only for his final year. He left school at sixteen, worked as a mechanic, and then served in a Soviet Army artillery unit in Kirzhach. His army pay was 7 roubles a month, which was not enough. So he persuaded several military drivers to siphon off a few litres of petrol regularly, giving them a share of the sales plus ice cream and pastries. The unit's officers bought the petrol at half the market price. No one complained, because everyone profited.

  Two years at the technical college in Ukhta, and later time at the Moscow Road Construction and Automobile Institute, ended without a degree. He then attended the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow. In 2000 he enrolled in a one-year correspondence course at Moscow State Law Academy.

  Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika allowed greater openness to entrepreneurship, and Abramovich began selling plastic ducks from a stall in Moscow. He moved on to perfumes and deodorants. With his first wife, Olga, he set up a company making dolls. He started and liquidated at least 20 companies, and within a few years his interests ranged from oil trading to pig farms, timber and sugar.

  In June 1992, aged 25, Abramovich was arrested and briefly imprisoned on a charge of stealing government property. The accusation was that he had taken 55 tankers of diesel fuel, worth 3.8 million rubles, from the Ukhta Oil Refinery. Forged documents allegedly let him intercept the train in Moscow and redirect the shipment to a military base, where the diesel was sold. He was never prosecuted. Lawyers later called the incident a misunderstanding, and the case was dropped once the refinery was compensated for its losses.

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• 3. Sibneft Deal

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  A yacht in the Caribbean, in either 1993 or 1994, was the setting for the meeting that changed Abramovich's career. Petr Aven, the president of Alfa-Bank, had arranged it so that Abramovich could meet Boris Berezovsky, who had connections to President Boris Yeltsin. Abramovich wanted a share of Russia's privatisation. His idea was to combine a refinery with an oil drilling business. He also felt he needed physical protection and wanted to ask Berezovsky for advice.

  The loans for shares scheme, run by Yeltsin, explains why the meeting mattered. In exchange for helping Yeltsin win the 1996 presidential election, businessmen would be offered stakes in Soviet assets for a tiny fraction of their market value.

  The bargain between the two men was simple. Abramovich would provide the funds Berezovsky needed for his television company ORT. In return, Berezovsky would use his influence to help create Sibneft.

  Two days before the state decided which companies to include in the sale, Berezovsky visited Alfred Koch, head of the State Committee for State Property Management. Koch added Sibneft to the list. Badri Patarkatsishvili, a friend of Berezovsky, then helped clear the field. Other possible bidders were paid off or received favours, so that Abramovich could win the auction.

  In August 1995, Yeltsin decreed the creation of Sibneft, with Abramovich and Berezovsky as top executives. Abramovich took a controlling interest in a rigged auction. The purchase ran through an offshore company, Runicom Ltd., with Russian affiliates.

  Running Sibneft, Abramovich reduced the company's taxes by hiring disabled workers and by setting up companies in the tax havens of Kalmykia and the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. In 2001, Sibneft was accused of underpaying taxes, but the case was dismissed without charges. Chukotka, the remote region that sheltered some of those companies, would soon give Abramovich a very different role.

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• 4. Aluminium And Court

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  "Every three days someone was murdered in that business," Abramovich said of aluminium, explaining why he hesitated to enter it. After privatisation, the so-called aluminium wars saw smelting plant managers, metals traders and journalists killed as groups battled for control of the industry.

  In early 2000, a major strike, the wars and the rise of Vladimir Putin pushed David and Simon Reuben to sell their aluminium assets to Abramovich. The deal was worth $575 million.

  February 2000 brought a meeting with the aluminium oligarchs Iskander Makhmudov, Oleg Deripaska and Lev Chernoi. Abramovich proposed consolidating the industry and ending the wars, backed by a major investment of his own. The talks at the Balchug Kempinski in Moscow ran until 5:00AM. The companies agreed to merge and form Rusal. Together with SUAL Group, Rusal controlled 90% of the Russian aluminium market.

  In two transactions in 2004, Abramovich sold his 50% stake in Rusal to Deripaska for £1.8 billion. That made him the richest person in the world under the age of 40.

  Millhouse Capital, set up in 2001 and part-owned by Eugene Shvidler, became the vehicle for his other holdings. In 2006 Millhouse acquired 41% of the steelmaker Evraz for £1.6 billion. In August 2001, companies linked to Abramovich had bought 29.3% of Aeroflot for $120 million, a stake he sold in 2003.

  In 2011, Berezovsky filed a civil suit, Berezovsky v Abramovich, in the High Court of Justice in London. He accused Abramovich of blackmail, breach of trust and breach of contract, and sought over £3 billion in damages. The roots lay in May 2001, when Patarkatsishvili asked Abramovich to pay US$1.3 billion to Berezovsky. Abramovich agreed on the basis that it would be the last request, and that the two men would stop associating themselves publicly with Berezovsky and his business interests. Berezovsky said the payment undervalued his interests.

  A conversation at Le Bourget airport in December 2000 became the key evidence. Patarkatsishvili had secretly recorded it. On the tape, Berezovsky spoke of how they should "legalise" their aluminium business. In court he claimed to be an undisclosed shareholder and said the word meant making his ownership official. Abramovich's lawyers said it meant structuring protection payments to Berezovsky so they complied with Western anti-money laundering regulations.

  On the 31st of August 2012, the High Court dismissed the lawsuit. The judge said the case hinged on whether to believe Berezovsky or Abramovich. She called Berezovsky "an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable witness". She added that he "regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes". Abramovich she found "a truthful, and on the whole, reliable witness".

  A later revelation clouded the verdict. The judge, Elizabeth Gloster, had a stepson who was paid almost £500,000 to represent Abramovich as a barrister early in the case. His involvement was alleged to be greater than disclosed. Berezovsky said, "Sometimes I have the impression that Putin himself wrote this judgment." Gloster declined to comment.

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• 5. Chelsea Years

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  In June 2003, Abramovich paid approximately $190 million to Ken Bates for the companies that control Chelsea in West London. The club then launched an ambitious commercial push to become a worldwide brand on a par with Manchester United and Real Madrid. Over his tenure he spent more than £2 billion on player signings. Another £90 million went on hiring and firing 13 different managers.

  The Harlington recreation ground at Imperial College London was where the team trained when he arrived. Its facilities were outdated and inferior to the dedicated training complexes at Manchester United and Liverpool. In 2004 he began building the £20 million Cobham Training Centre, which opened in 2007.

  Chelsea finished that first season second in the Premier League, up from fourth the year before. They also reached the Champions League semi-finals, where the eventual winner was the surprise contender Porto, managed by José Mourinho. For Abramovich's second season, Mourinho replaced Claudio Ranieri as Chelsea manager. In 2004-05, Chelsea became league champions for the first time in 50 years. Abramovich also spent heavily on Portuguese players: €165.1 million in total, with €90.9 million going to Benfica and €74.2 million to Porto.

  Critics coined the name "Chelski" for the new Chelsea. They used it to mock billionaires who buy trophies and distort the transfer market with personal wealth. Their example was Andriy Shevchenko, signed for a then-British record fee of around £30 million.

  Under Abramovich the club won 21 major trophies, including the Premier League five times, the FA Cup five times and the League Cup three times. The 2010 season brought the club's first league and FA Cup double. Supporters read his visible emotion at nearly every game as a sign of real love for football. He often visited players in the dressing room afterwards. That stopped for a time in early 2007, when press reports described a feud with Mourinho over the performance of players such as Shevchenko.

  In March 2004, Sibneft agreed a three-year sponsorship of CSKA Moscow worth €41.3 million. Some viewed the deal as an answer to accusations that Abramovich was "unpatriotic" after buying Chelsea. UEFA rules stop one person owning two clubs in its competitions, so he holds no equity in CSKA, and UEFA cleared him of a conflict of interest. In May 2005 CSKA won the UEFA Cup, the first Russian club to win a major European football competition. Abramovich also helped fund the Russia national team, including the $7 million annual salary of its Dutch coach Guus Hiddink. Piet de Visser, a scout who later became a personal assistant to Abramovich at Chelsea, had recommended Hiddink.

  In March 2017, Chelsea received approval for a £500 million stadium of up to 60,000 seats to replace Stamford Bridge. Then the Home Office delayed the renewal of Abramovich's British visa, and he withdrew his application. In May 2018 the club halted the stadium plans, citing an "unfavourable investment climate" and a lack of assurances about his immigration status.

  Catherine Belton's 2020 book Putin's People accused Abramovich of buying Chelsea on Putin's orders. He denied the claim and sued Belton and the publisher HarperCollins for defamation. The defendants agreed that the claims had no factual basis.

  In 2021, Abramovich entered Chelsea into the newly announced European Super League. Critics said it encouraged greed among the richest clubs. Two days later he pulled Chelsea out, other English clubs followed, and the league suspended operations.

  After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich handed "stewardship and care" of the club to the Chelsea Charitable Foundation. In March 2022 he said he would sell because of the war and the threat of a full asset seizure. The UK government froze his assets but allowed the club to keep operating in football-related activities. On the 12th of March 2022, the Premier League disqualified him as a director. In May 2022, BlueCo, led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, acquired the club.

  The past has kept following the club. In 2026, Chelsea was fined £10.75 million for undisclosed payments to agents and other figures around signings between 2011 and 2018, including those of Eden Hazard and Samuel Eto'o.

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• 6. Kremlin And Chukotka

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  By 1996, at the age of 30, Abramovich had grown close to President Boris Yeltsin and had moved into an apartment inside the Kremlin at the invitation of the Yeltsin family. He was the first person to recommend Vladimir Putin to Yeltsin as a successor. When Putin formed his first cabinet as Prime Minister in 1999, Abramovich interviewed each candidate for cabinet positions before approval. In 2007, Putin consulted him on who should succeed as president, and Abramovich personally recommended Dmitry Medvedev.

  Early in his presidency, Putin set a clear hierarchy. Oligarchs kept their assets and privileges in exchange for staying out of politics and pledging complete allegiance. Those who challenged the Kremlin ended up in exile or in prison. Abramovich went along with the arrangement.

  Control of the television channels was a priority for Putin. Abramovich acted as an intermediary, buying channels and transferring them to Putin's friends, and Putin praised him for it. He acquired a 49% stake in ORT for $80 million and gifted it to Putin.

  Chris Hutchins, a biographer of Putin, compared the pair to a father and a favourite son. In the early 2000s, Abramovich said he addressed Putin with the formal Russian "вы" rather than the informal "ты", out of respect for Putin's seniority. Inside the Kremlin he was known as "Mr. A".

  The influence was disputed. In September 2012, Judge Elizabeth Gloster found no evidence that Abramovich could manipulate or influence Putin or his officials to serve his own commercial goals. In 2014, Abramovich hired Robbie Williams to headline a New Year's dinner for Putin's inner circle in Moscow. The event was likely the inspiration for Williams' song "Party Like a Russian".

  In 1999, Abramovich was elected to the State Duma as the representative for the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, an impoverished region in the Russian Far East. He started a charity, Pole of Hope, to help people there, especially children. In December 2000 he was elected governor, replacing Aleksandr Nazarov. As governor he spent approximately 1.5 billion of his own money on schools, hospitals and infrastructure through the charity. A decree signed by the President of Russia awarded him the Order of Honour for developing the region.

  Abramovich tried to resign in 2007 but agreed to stay at Putin's request. In early July 2008 he resigned for good, wanting to spend more time in the West and feeling the job was complete. His charitable work in Chukotka continued. Average monthly salaries there had risen from about US$165 in 2000 to US$826 in 2006.

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• 7. Sanctions And Passports

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  The day after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian magnates contacted Abramovich and asked him to serve as an informal envoy to Putin. On the 3rd and the 4th of March 2022, he attended peace talks on the Ukraine-Belarus border. Abramovich, the Ukrainian politician Rustem Umierov and one other negotiator then developed symptoms consistent with likely poisoning. They described "piercing pain in the eyes" and inflammation of the eyes and skin. All recovered quickly.

  Bellingcat investigated and said that chocolate or water the three had consumed may have been laced. Experts took samples but could not identify the material, owing to the passage of time. Western sources said the low dose was a warning, most likely to Abramovich, possibly from Moscow hardliners trying to sabotage the talks. An unnamed US official blamed "environmental factors". Igor Zhovkva, an official in the Ukrainian president's office, told the BBC that the delegation was "fine". By late March 2022 Abramovich was sidelined from the talks. He later played a key role in the release of Aiden Aslin and other foreign prisoners of war from Russian captivity.

  CAATSA, the sanctions law Donald Trump signed in 2017, already named Abramovich among many Russian oligarchs. He is also one of the Navalny 35. In March 2022, because of his alleged ties to Putin and his investments in Russia, the UK, Canada, Australia, the European Union, Switzerland, New Zealand and Ukraine sanctioned him. Abramovich denies having a close relationship with Putin.

  In December 2022, Canada used its SEMA seizure and forfeiture mechanism for the first time, targeting Abramovich. It alleged that US$26 million held by Granite Capital Holdings Ltd was really his. In December 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed his lawsuit against the EU sanctions.

  Jersey froze $7 billion of his assets and searched his residences, as part of an investigation into suspected money laundering and sanctions breaches. A protracted legal battle ended in 2025, when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council rejected his legal action. The assets stayed frozen.

  The £2.5 billion from the sale of Chelsea is frozen as well. In 2022 it was reported that Abramovich was owed a $2 billion loan from the club, set up ahead of possible sanctions. He has promised to use the sale proceeds to support victims of the war in Ukraine but wants flexibility over how. The UK government has threatened legal action to ensure the money goes to humanitarian aid. In March 2026, authorities in Jersey began investigating whether the funds amount to "the proceeds of crime". In April 2026, Abramovich sued in the European Court of Human Rights, calling the freeze "unfair and abusive".

  His passports tell a parallel story. For years Abramovich travelled in and out of the UK on a Tier-1 investor visa, meant for foreigners investing at least £2 million. After the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and rising tensions between the UK and Russia, British authorities delayed the renewal. In May 2018, under the Law of Return, he became an Israeli citizen, which before sanctions permitted entry to the UK.

  Switzerland came first. In July 2016 he applied for a residence permit in the canton of Valais, planning to move his tax residency there. Valais authorities approved it, but FedPol investigators denied it over suspicions of money laundering. He withdrew in June 2017, and in 2021 Swiss authorities cleared him of any suspicion.

  In September 2017 he was granted residency in Jersey under a scheme for ultra-high net worth individuals, though he never actually lived there. He transferred $7 billion of assets to the island between 2017 and 2021.

  In April 2021, Abramovich became a Portuguese citizen under a law granting citizenship to descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled during the Inquisition. In March 2022, the rabbi who certified his ancestry was arrested over possible fraud in certifications. The allegations were later dropped for lack of evidence, and Portugal tightened the law. Abramovich allegedly now spends most of his time in Turkey, where a mansion in Üsküdar, Istanbul, was reportedly bought for $18 million in September 2023. He has denied buying property there.

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• 8. Fortune On Display

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  According to Forbes, Abramovich, with his family and related trusts, is the 371st richest person in the world, with a net worth of $9.3 billion. Bloomberg ranks him 444th, at $8.56 billion. Those who know him describe a naturally secretive, reserved, calculating and highly efficient man. He often dresses simply, and is described as shy, rarely making eye contact.

  In 2001, Abramovich bought the Château de la Croë in Antibes, then spent €100 million on a restoration finished in 2008. It added a rooftop swimming pool, a gym and a home cinema. In September 2009 he paid $90 million for a 70-acre estate on Saint Barthélemy. A 2011 New Year's Eve party there cost £5 million and featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Toots Hibbert for 300 guests, among them George Lucas, Martha Stewart, Marc Jacobs and Jimmy Buffett.

  In September 2011, he bought 16 Kensington Palace Gardens in London, a 15-bedroom mansion, for £90 million, and added an underground swimming pool. In early 2018 he bought four Upper East Side townhouses in Manhattan for a planned megamansion. He sold them to his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova for $91.4 million later that year.

  Eclipse, a yacht of 162.5 metres built in Germany by Blohm + Voss, was launched in September 2009 and delivered in 2010. She is believed to have cost around US$400 million. She was the world's largest privately owned yacht until 2013, when the 180-metre Azzam overtook her. She has at least two swimming pools, a cinema, two helicopter landing pads and a submarine that can dive to 160 feet. Armour plating surrounds the bridge and the master suite, and the windows are bullet proof. The fleet is colloquially known as "Abramovich's Navy".

  An aircraft earned its own nickname. In 2016 he bought a Boeing 767 known as The Bandit for an estimated $300 million. Hawaiian Airlines had ordered it and then cancelled. Its interior included a 30-seat dining room and a boardroom, and it carried the same air missile avoidance system as Air Force One. He sold it in 2021.

  His art collection, estimated at $963 million as of 2023, runs to over 300 pieces. It includes work by Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Natalia Goncharova, Vera Rockline and René Magritte. In May 2008 he paid €61.4 million for Francis Bacon's Triptych 1976, a record for a post-war work of art. The same month he paid €23.9 million for Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a record for a living artist.

  In December 1987, Abramovich married Olga Yurevna Lysova, and they divorced in 1990. In October 1991 he married Irina Malandina, a former Aeroflot stewardess. They have five children: Ilya, Arina, Sofia, Arkadiy and Anna. They divorced in March 2007, with a reported settlement of US$300 million. In 2008 he married Dasha Zhukova, daughter of the oligarch Alexander Zhukov. They have a son, Aaron Alexander, and a daughter, Leah Lou, and their divorce was finalised in 2019. His daughter Sofia is a professional equestrian who owns 30 horses and has publicly criticised Putin over the invasion.

  Abramovich has reportedly donated more money to charity than any other living Russian. In 2015 he gave approximately $30 million to Tel Aviv University for a nanoscience and nanotechnology centre. In March 2018 he gave £14 million to Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, after earlier donations of £40 million. In May 2020 he funded a 5,400 square metre intensive care unit there. That year he also paid for National Health Service staff to stay at the Stamford Bridge Millennium Hotel. He funded a forest of 25,000 trees in memory of Lithuanian Jews who died in the Holocaust. The FinCEN Files name him the largest single donor, between 2005 and 2018, to the Ir David Foundation, which runs City of David and buys Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Four companies he controls gave it $100 million.

  Peter Morgan's 2022 play Patriots, which dramatises the life of Boris Berezovsky, makes Abramovich a central character.

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