Forbes reclassifies 24 billionaires in latest rich list as Russian

A day after issuing its 2025 World Billionaires List, Forbes Magazine has reclassified 24 entrants as Russian, having originally listed the Russian billionaires in question as coming from elsewhere.

Russia’s richest entrepreneurs now once again include the founder of global conglomerate USM, Alisher Usmanov; the founder of EuroChem and the Siberian Coal Energy Company, Andrey Melnichenko; Yelena Baturina, the widow of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov; the former vice-president of Lukoil, Leonid Fedun; the former head of Alfa Bank, Petr Aven, and the founder of the private investment fund ONEXIM Group, Mikhail Prokhorov.

When Forbes released its annual league table of the world’s richest people on Tuesday, the list included 146 Russians in total, while listing Usmanov as Uzbek, Melnichenko as coming from the UAE, Baturina as British, and Prokhorov as Swiss. Fedun, Forbes said, came from Monaco, while Aven was listed as Latvian. All of them are now listed as Russian, along with several others in the reissued list.

While Tuesday’s version of the list categorised the billionaires by their place of residence, the updated version lists them according to their citizenship. For the second year in a row, Russia’s richest person was the Azerbaijan-born co-owner of energy corporation Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov, who has an estimated fortune of $28.7 billion.