Vladimir Gusinsky

Name: Vladimir Gusinsky

Age: 51

Estimated wealth: unknown (estimated at less than $1 billion)

Member of the Group of Seven: yes

Current home: Israel

What others have said about him: “I love hunting wild goose.” (Boris Berezovsky, making a pun on Gusinsky’s name – which is derived from the Russian word gus, “goose” – at the height of the two oligarchs’ rivalry.)

The second most famous Yeltsin-era oligarch (after Boris Berezovsky), Gusinsky created Most Bank, and then went on to create a media empire – Mediamost. Its flagship outlets – NTV television and Itogi news magazine (which was jointly published with Newsweek through 2001) became famous for the quality of their news coverage and for their critical take on the war in Chechnya. Gusinsky’s group also had one of Russia’s best private security and intelligence structures. Towards the end of Yeltsin’s tenure, Gusinsky chose badly in the succession struggle, opting to support the losing “clan” of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and ex-Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov. After Putin’s election, Gusinsky was briefly jailed and eventually opted for exile in Spain. In his absence, the state-run gas monopoly Gazprom destroyed Mediamost and brought all but one of its media outlets under state control. The Kremlin then unsuccessfully tried to have Gusinsky extradited from Spain. Gusinsky, who also has Israeli citizenship, now lives in Israel, and has a stake in that country’s Maariv daily newspaper.