Early Life
Born in Tbilisi to a Jewish family, Patarkatsishvili's membership of the Soviet Communist party's youth wing, the Komsomol, gave him contacts he found useful later. Between 1994 and 2001, he lived in Moscow. To avoid prosecution on charges of alleged fraud in Russia, he moved to Tbilisi. (Patarkatsishvili's business activities had made him the richest man in Georgia with an estimated wealth of $ 12 billion. In his Russian business deals, he was closely associated with Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. In 1992, he became a deputy chief executive of Berezovsky's LogoVAZ group.
In January 1995, Patarkatsishvili became deputy chief executive with responsibility for finance at Russia's ORT TV. In March – May 2001, he was chief executive of Russia's TV6 channel, which, like ORT, was partly owned by Berezovsky. Early in 2006, he bought out Berezovskys stake in Moscow's independent Kommersant publishing house, which he sold on in August that year to senior Gazprom executive Alisher Usmanov.
In 1997, he oversaw the privatization of the Sibneft oil company in auctions that later seemed to have been fixed. Berezovsky snapped up the stake on offer for a fraction of the market value.
Read more about this topic: Badri Patarkatsishvili
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