Vladimir Potanin

Name: Vladimir Potanin

Age: 42

Estimated wealth: $1.8 billion

Member of the Group of Seven: yes

Current home: Russia

What others have said about him: “It was the worst investment I ever made.” (US billionaire George Soros, who put nearly a billion dollars into Potanin’s telecom enterprise, Svyazinvest, just a year before Russia‘s 1998 financial meltdown)

The scion of a privileged communist family, Potanin, a high-ranking Komsomol (Communist Youth) official, at first followed a path set down by his father, who held a prominent position in the Soviet ministry of foreign trade. In 1991, however, he used his connections to launch the holding company Interros. He created several banks, including Oneximbank, which was one of Russia‘s largest prior to the 1998 meltdown. Potanin was the main architect of the 1995 “loan for shares” scheme, following which he acquired Norilsk Nickel, which controls 35 percent of world nickel reserves and is also the world’s largest producer of platinium and palladium. Potanin, who was briefly a deputy prime minister following Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection, also controls one of the country’s two largest agricultural industrial groups and owns a number of Russian media, including Izvestiya daily newspaper. Since Vladimir Putin’s election, Potanin has adopted a low profile, stressing his good working relationship with the president and conspicuously failing to defend fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky after his arrest last October. He is a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum and in 2002 coughed up $1 million to purchase Kazimir’s Malevich’s painting, “Black Square,” for St. Petersburg‘s Hermitage Museum.