Business Career
Roman Abramovich started his multi-billion-dollar business during his army service where he sold stolen gasoline to some of the commissioned officers of his unit. After a brief stint in the Soviet Army, he married his first wife, Olga. He first worked as a street-trader and then as a mechanic at a local factory. At the peak of perestroika, Abramovich sold imported rubber ducks from his Moscow apartment. Some sources suggest that these ducks were imported illegally, but no evidence of this exists.
A 2,000-ruble wedding present from Olga's parents (about £1,000 or US$2,000 at that time) was invested by Abramovich in smuggling of black market goods or contraband to sell in Moscow in or around December 1987. Abramovich soon doubled, then tripled, the investment, his confidence growing with each success in this smuggling business. Soon he progressed to making plastic toys (including plastic sailors) and started up an automobile parts cooperative. He attended the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow (where he sold retreaded car tires as a sideline), then traded commodities for Runicom, a Swiss trading company.
In 1988, as Perestroika opened up opportunities for entrepreneurs in the Soviet Union, Abramovich got a chance to legitimize his underworld business. He and Olga set up a company making dolls. "It brought success almost immediately," says Olga. Due to his business acumen, within a few years his wealth spread from oil conglomerates to pig farms and he also started investing in other businesses. Abramovich set up and liquidated at least 20 companies during the early 1990s, in sectors as diverse as tire retreading and bodyguard recruitment.
From 1992 to 1995, Abramovich founded five companies that conducted resale, produced consumer goods, and acted as intermediaries, eventually specializing in the trading of oil and oil products. However, in 1992, he was arrested and sent to prison in a case of theft of government property: AVEKS-Komi sent a train containing 55 cisterns of diesel fuel, worth 3.8 million roubles, from the Ukhta Oil Refinery; Abramovich met the train in Moscow and resent the shipment to the Kaliningrad military base under a fake agreement, but the fuel arrived in Riga. Abramovich co-operated with the investigation, and the case was closed after the oil production factory was compensated by the diesel's buyer, the Latvian-US company, Chikora International.
In 1995, Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, an associate of President Boris Yeltsin, acquired the controlling interest in the large oil company Sibneft. The deal was within the controversial loans-for-shares program and each partner paid US$100 million for half of the company, below the stake's stock market value of US$150 million at the time, and rapidly turned it up into billions. The fast-rising value of the company led many observers, in hindsight, to suggest that the real cost of the company should have been in the billions of dollars. Abramovich later admitted in court that he paid huge bribes (in billions) to government officials and obtained protection from gangsters to acquire these and other assets (including aluminium assets during the aluminium wars).
Thus, the main stages of Abramovich's financial career were: January 1989 to May 1991, chairman of the Comfort Co-op (manufacturer of plastic toys); May 1991 to May 1993, director of the ABK small enterprise, Moscow. According to various sources, from 1992 to 1995 Roman Abramovich set up five companies engaged in the production of consumer goods and selling-and-buying. In May 1995, jointly with Boris Berezovsky, he set up the P.K. Trust close joint-stock company. In 1995 and 1996, he established another 10 firms: Mekong close joint-stock company, Centurion-M close joint-stock company, Agrofert limited liability company, Multitrans close joint-stock company, Oilimpex close joint-stock company, Sibreal close joint-stock company, Forneft close joint-stock company, Servet close joint-stock company, Branco close joint-stock company, Vector-A limited liability company, which, again together with Berezovsky, he used to purchase the shares of the Sibneft public company.
The Guardian concludes Abramovich's career as follows:
| “ | By 1996, at the age of 30, Abramovich had become so rich and politically well-connected that he had become close to President Boris Yeltsin, and had moved into an apartment in the Kremlin at the invitation of the Yeltsin family. In 1999, and now a tycoon, Abramovich was elected governor of Russia's remote, far eastern province of Chukotka, and has since lavished £112 million (€132 million) on charity to rebuild the impoverished region. The identikit image being pieced together for us was of a self-made man who was not only powerful and wealthy, but acutely aware of those who had done less well in the tumultuous 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell. | ” |
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