Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Name: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Age: 40

Estimated wealth: $7.2 billion

Member of the Group of Seven: yes

Current home: Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison

What others have said about him: “Perhaps you would like me to remind you how you made your fortune.” (Vladimir Putin, allegedly, to Khodorkovsky during a February 2003 Kremlin meeting, after the oligarch suggested that the president needed to do something about corruption among Russian bureaucrats)

A former top-ranking Komsomol (Communist youth) official, Khodorkovsky used his ties with the nomenklatura (Communist Party elite) during the Soviet era to import computers and, in 1990, to establish Bank Menatep. In 1995, he acquired what was then Russia’s second largest oil company, Yukos, for a fraction of its real value, and turned it into Russia’s largest petrochem company. The 1998 financial crisis (and the movement of the bank’s assets offshore) left Menatep an insolvent shell. Nevertheless, by 1999 Khodorkovsky was on the rebound, and was among the first Russian businessmen to impose international standards of accounting and management to his company, turning him into the scion of Western investors. In 2003, Khodorkovsky engineered a merger of Yukos with Roman Abramovich’s smaller Sibneft, to create the world’s fourth largest oil company and Russia’s largest corporation. Yet soon thereafter, Khodorkovsky had a falling out with the Kremlin after publicly announcing that he was funding opposition parties. The oligarch was arrested at gunpoint last October, and authorities launched a full-scale campaign against Yukos’ major shareholders. The merger with Sibneft was called off and Khodorkovsky stepped down as chairman of Yukos. Prior to his incarceration, Khodorkovsky was known for his unassuming lifestyle, taking his family on holiday to Finland, while his fellow oligarchs favored luxurious resorts on the French Riviera or lavish mansions in the English countryside.