In no Western European country can a person earn billions of dollars in 5-6 years, President Putin said at the end of 2003 in response to a question about the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Yuri Kovalchuk was not yet a billionaire. It turned out to be easy to fix

Three federal television channels, the country's third bank by assets, a powerful insurance group, leading enterprises in nuclear engineering, shipbuilding, and petrochemicals. Any oligarch would envy such a gentlemanly set, but this is not a complete list. The threads of control of this empire lead to a three-story Art Nouveau building in the quiet center of St. Petersburg. On the house is the flag and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Thailand. And here is the owner - a short-haired gray-haired man in a gray suit comes out of the door, accompanied by two guards. Meet Yuri Kovalchuk, Honorary Consul of Thailand, main shareholder of the St. Petersburg Rossiya Bank.

Several years ago, something incredible began to happen to Gazprom’s subsidiaries.

In 2004, the gas monopoly sold its insurer Sogaz. Control over Sogaz cost the final buyer 1.7 billion rubles. Over the next two and a half years, the insurance company earned its shareholders 7.5 billion rubles in net profit and paid them $50 million in dividends. It’s a great deal for the buyer, even when compared to collateral auctions. Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich paid $100 million for a controlling stake in Sibneft; Sibneft's total profit, according to international reporting standards, for the next two years did not exceed this amount.

Then it was the turn of Leader, the country’s largest management company. 75% of its shares went to the new owners for 880 million rubles, and the very next year, 2006, the company earned 1.2 billion rubles in net profit. But the point is not even that the investments paid off in just a year: Gazprom decorated its management company like a Christmas tree with interesting assets. At the time of the transaction, Leader was listed as a shareholder of Gazprombank with a share of 43% of the shares. Formally, Leader acted only as a representative of Gazfond, the ultimate beneficiary of this package. But although Gazfond was founded by Gazprom and its subsidiaries, according to its charter, its owners do not have rights to the property contributed to the fund; everything is managed by the management company. Gazprombank is a real “storehouse” of non-core assets for the gas monopoly: here is a controlling stake in the Gazprom-Media holding, and the flagships of the nuclear industry “Atomstroyexport” and “United Machine-Building Plants”, and the “Russian BASF” - the giant of the domestic petrochemical industry “Sibur”, and, more recently, Stroytransgaz, Russia's largest pipeline builder... Eventually, Gazprom admitted that it no longer controlled its settlement bank. At the shareholders meeting in June, Gazprom appointed only five out of twelve people to the board of directors of Gazprombank.

The distribution of property was striking in its simplicity. “I and several other hotheads proposed reform of Gazprom. And they answered us: let’s better sell off non-core assets. People like me usually hung out here,” recalls politician Vladimir Milov. In 2002, he worked as Deputy Minister of Energy, then as head of an analytical group at the Center for Strategic Research, which is close to the Ministry of Economic Development. “As for Sogaz, after the presidential elections [2004], the final decision was made - to approve the sale to a strategic investor... Putin said: Bank Rossiya, and that’s it. Gref, Sharonov (the Minister of Economic Development, who was on the board of directors of Gazprom, and his first deputy, who was responsible for the budgets of the monopolies - Forbes), and other guys were amazed. This also outraged me,” says Milov. “Putin never personally interferes in the activities of any companies. Any decisions, including those regarding Sogaz, were made by shareholders within the framework of existing corporate procedures,” Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov responded to a Forbes request.

Stories with former Gazprom subsidiaries have one thing in common. They came under the control of Rossiya Bank, whose largest shareholder (30.4%) is Yuri Kovalchuk. Today “Russia” manages assets with a total value of more than $15 billion. In addition to industrial and financial companies, “Russians” control a serious political resource - the largest media holding in Russia of three television channels (NTV, REN TV, Petersburg - Channel 5) and newspaper "Izvestia".

The general public first heard about Kovalchuk in February 2004, when presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin addressed voters from the pages of Kommersant: “I have a lot of concrete evidence of Putin’s participation in business. The famous Abramovich, standing in the shadow of Timchenko, the Kovalchuk brothers and others are responsible for Putin’s business.” Putin was successfully re-elected to a second term, but Rybkin did not publish any evidence. Disgraced Boris Berezovsky, who sponsored Rybkin's campaign, says he doesn't know what facts the candidate had in mind.

Where did one of the most successful businessmen of Putin's eight years come from?

Yura Kovalchuk had everything he needed for a successful career in the Land of the Soviets. My grandfather, a Ukrainian peasant, worked at one of the St. Petersburg factories before the October Revolution. Father is a historian, doctor of sciences, author of hundreds of scientific works, mainly about the siege of Leningrad. The third generation of “St. Petersburg” Kovalchukov, Yuri and his older brother Mikhail (now the director of the Kurchatov Institute, the main promoter of nanotechnology), entered the physics department of Leningrad State University. Yuri studied better.

“He was a handsome young man, girls fell for him,” recalls Kovalchuk’s classmate Tatyana Borisova. “The boy comes from a good family, plays sports and all that.” At the age of 28, Kovalchuk defended his candidate’s thesis, and at the age of 35, his doctorate. After Leningrad State University, he got a job at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. A. F. Ioffe. Specialized in lasers and semiconductors. Kovalchuk’s department was headed by future Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov. In 1987, Alferov became director of the institute. Two years later, 36-year-old Kovalchuk became his first deputy.

Several people worked with Kovalchuk at the Leningrad Physics and Technology Institute who went with him through life even after the collapse of the USSR. For example, Andrei Fursenko, now the Minister of Education and Science (his younger brother Sergei today oversees the media business of Rossiya Bank). The Fursenko and Kovalchuk families knew each other well. The recently deceased Alexander Fursenko, the brothers' father, worked together with Valentin Kovalchuk (Yuri and Mikhail's father) at the Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences; An expert in modern US history, he was in good standing in the Leningrad Regional Committee. In 1987, Andrei Fursenko became deputy director of the Institute. Ioffe. A little earlier, in 1982–1985, the “foreign department” of the Physicotechnical Institute was headed by the future president of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin.

The newly appointed deputy directors of the Physicotechnical Institute were in a hurry to take advantage of the opportunities that perestroika opened up for quick-witted people. “Kovalchuk tried to organize a department that would deal with practical developments,” recalls academician Yuri Osipyan, who opposed him in defending his doctoral dissertation. Kovalchuk and Fursenko organized several scientific and technical companies around the institute. But the main source of income was trading in computers. The director didn't like it. “Alferov was told: the companies are in the interests of the institute. Well, then, closer to 1991, it turned out that everything was going into the pockets of the founders,” says Vladimir Pribylovsky, the author of several works on Putin and his entourage. “As a result, Alferov kicked out Kovalchuk, Fursenko and Myachin (an employee of Phystech, who will also work in Rossiya. - Forbes).” “Yes, there was a conflict, but I wouldn’t want to go into it,” confirms Osipyan. Alferov did not comment on his relationship with his former employee. Kovalchuk declined to be interviewed for this article.

In another time and for another person, expulsion from great science and an institute where a brilliant career had developed would have been a tragedy. But not for Kovalchuk. In 1991, he already had a new roof over his head.

Early 1990s. St. Petersburg, German restaurant “Chaika”. Stained wood on the walls, models of ancient ships everywhere, a steering wheel in a prominent place. The smoky room is full of people. People in suits are quietly talking about something at tables in cozy niches. In one of the companies there is not the last St. Petersburg official, the head of the city committee for external relations. “Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] visited [the restaurant] regularly,” recalls Alexander Tomashevich, former director of Chaika. “We had decent beer from Germany and German sausages... He came alone or with one of his friends.”

Created in 1987, the restaurant was one of the first Leningrad enterprises with the participation of foreign capital. The co-owner of the joint venture was Tchaika GmbH, owned by three German restaurateurs. By the early 1990s, the establishment had become a favorite hangout for those who could spend more than $20 a night. At first, the restaurant was a foreign exchange restaurant, and the black marketeers had to pretend to be foreigners to get inside. “When we started working for rubles, Chaika became a platform where everyone gathered. There was no place to stand,” says Tomashevich. According to him, members of the newly created Association of Joint Ventures of Leningrad (LenASP), which included Chaika, often met at the establishment.

LenASP was an influential structure. A romantic of capitalism, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak wanted to protect the “new economy” from bureaucratic arbitrariness and red tape. In 1994, at the mayor's office, on the initiative of the association, an interdepartmental commission on enterprises with foreign investment was created, headed by Putin. “Getting to City Hall was pretty easy. There were always a lot of people in Putin's reception room. Igor Sechin (at that time Putin’s secretary - Forbes) only managed to regulate all this. There were no problems with communication or support,” recalls Gennady Volodchenko. Formerly the head of a sector of the Leningrad Regional Committee, he became director of the association.

“We all wanted to “climb” under the authorities so that they would listen to us. They reported their problems. And Putin at that time was very accessible and understood everything well. I never puffed out my cheeks during personal meetings... I helped the association,” recalls Tomashevich. The first president of the association was Vladimir Kolovay, general director of the Proletarskaya Pobeda shoe factory, who created a joint venture with the German Salamander. But the “soul” of the association was not Kolovay, nor Volodchenko, but Yuri Kovalchuk. “He was the brains of our team, he generated all the ideas,” says Volodchenko. In the rank of deputy president of LenASP, Kovalchuk was responsible for contacts with Sobchak and Putin.

Kovalchuk apparently met Putin through his work at LenASP. At the very beginning of the 1990s, Putin was assistant to the rector of Leningrad State University for international affairs. In the summer of 1991, Leningrad State University registered a joint venture with Procter&Gamble, from which the transnational giant began expansion in the Russian market. According to Pribylovsky, Putin was directly involved in the creation of the joint venture, which immediately joined the association. After Sobchak’s victory in the mayor’s election in June 1991, Putin moved to the mayor’s office as chairman of the KVS.

LenASP members paid DM 15,000 per year for participation in the association. “We earned our money,” Volodchenko is convinced. It was believed that the access to Smolny, which the organization provided, more than paid for the costs. Kovalchuk, for example, after a year of work at LenASP, a bank appeared with the loud name “Russia”.

Kovalchuk and his partners received “Russia,” one might say, from the hands of Putin. This credit institution was created in 1990 with money from the Communist Party. The Administration of the Leningrad Regional Committee, headed by Arkady Krutikhin, opened current accounts there and became the main shareholder of the bank. To “finance the activities of the central party bodies,” the Leningrad comrades extracted 50 million rubles from the reserve fund of the CPSU for “Russia.” Along with the regional committee, its founders included the Rus insurance company (in 2002, State Duma deputy Vladislav Reznik sold a controlling stake in Rus for $10 million) and the Russian Video association, which, in order to contribute its share of 13 million rubles, took them in debt from the same regional committee. "Russia" became one of hundreds of enterprises used by party financiers to withdraw money from the CPSU. After the failure of the August putsch, the scheme fell apart. Krutikhin’s boss, Nikolai Kruchina, fell out of the window of his apartment. RSFSR President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree on the nationalization of the property of the CPSU.

On September 2, 1991, Sobchak ordered to take control of the funds and property of “Russia”, and at the same time work out the issue of creating a fund based on the bank with the participation of foreign investors, the main goal of which would be “stabilizing the economy of the Leningrad region.” The person in charge is Putin. Putin could report on the completion of the task within three months. The fund was indeed created, but not on the basis, but with the participation of “Russia”, which in December 1991, that is, during the period of external management by the mayor’s office, changed owners. The place of the Leningrad Regional Committee and companies associated with its leadership was taken by companies associated with Kovalchuk, the Fursenko brothers, Yakunin and Viktor Myachin.

The proximity to power was emphasized by the location: “Russia” was allocated an outbuilding of Smolny. There were other pleasant surprises. For several months, until March 1992, 50 million rubles requisitioned from the CPSU were circulating in “Russia”. And in February 1992, Sobchak ordered the accumulation of proceeds from the sale of European humanitarian aid in “Russia”. In the future, the funds were supposed to go to support farmers in the Leningrad region. If you believe Oleg Goncharov, the former director of Lenkhleboproduct (this structure was involved in the implementation of aid), 69 million rubles had accumulated in the bank. Farmers got much less. “We spent 76,000 rubles on loans to farmers,” says Vladimir Antonov, executive director of the St. Petersburg to Farmers association. “Sixty-nine million? There is some kind of mistake here, in those days there was no such money,” he is perplexed. City Council deputies sent a request to the mayor's office about the fate of the funds raised from the sale of humanitarian aid. The case was put on hold.

Kovalchuk did not abandon high technology either. After the conflict with Alferov, most of the employees of the companies created by Kovalchuk and Fursenko moved to the territory of the Svetlana plant. The main activity was concentrated in JSC Semiconductor Devices. Its shares were distributed among companies associated with Rossiya. The company specialized in the production of laser equipment for medicine. The business is not big, but it is not hopeless either: in 1995, for example, the company exported equipment worth $400,000.

This could not have happened without the support of the city either. In 1992, the mayor's office created the Regional Fund for Scientific and Technological Development. Rossiya was one of its co-founders, and Andrei Fursenko headed the new structure. The main project of the foundation was the innovation center on the territory of Svetlana. The foundation helped renovate one of the buildings that housed scientific and technical firms that received benefits on local taxes and utility bills. The largest residents of the center were companies associated with Rossiya. Here is an illustrative example: in July 1997, the Fursenko Foundation received a budget loan of 1.5 billion rubles (about $260,000 at the then exchange rate) under guarantees from “Russia”. And already in February of the following year, the foundation, along with a dozen other organizations, was released by a special city law from obligations to return funds.

In the first half of the nineties, Rossiya's business was built on good relations with local authorities. Forms of income include managing the financial affairs of the city administration, participating in socially significant projects subsidized from the budget. By the standards of that time, it was a very intimate business, almost invisible against the general background.

“It was just a small bank, from the balance sheets it was clear that it couldn’t do anything big,” recalls one of the St. Petersburg entrepreneurs, who asked that his name not be used in print. — At that time we had the North Trade Bank, BaltONEXIM, Inkombank. The same Viking, the bank of Mikhail Mirilashvili (serving time for organizing a murder - Forbes) was much larger.” The only reason why Kovalchuk was mentioned in the St. Petersburg press of that time was his appointment as honorary consul of Thailand.

What endeared the future head of state to this non-public, almost invisible person compared to the heroes of the 1990s?

“Contact, picks up quickly. He’s very specific, doesn’t like to talk, and immediately takes the bull by the horns,” says Academician Osipyan about Kovalchuk. “He has a sense of humor,” Volodchenko, the former director of LenASP, adds to Kovalchuk’s portrait. “He knows a lot of jokes.” He readily recalls how in the early 1990s the leaders of the association and Rossiya Bank met in an informal setting. Vitaly Savelyev, who worked as the chairman of the board of Rossiya for a couple of years (now he is the first vice-president of AFK Sistema), had a yacht. The whole group sailed on it in the Gulf of Finland and had evenings. Volodchenko says that former colleagues from LenASP, including Kovalchuk, still maintain relations with each other.

The ability to make friends is not Kovalchuk’s only distinctive quality. People from "Russia" definitely have a sense of the future. Even in the early 1990s, when everything seemed to be going to hell, they were not lazy to work for the future. The former general director of OMZ, Sergei Lipsky, who lost his job after the company came under the control of the “Russians,” studied at Leningrad University in the early nineties. “Bank Rossiya played a super positive role,” he recalls. — At their expense, seminars were held for students, a kind of labor exchange. Their chairman of the board, Savelyev, is very smart, and spoke there several times.” And in 2000, Rossiya established the North-West Center for Strategic Research, also to design the future.

We're all tired. It’s time to stop and understand who we are,” Kovalchuk said at the presentation of the Center for Social Development in November 2000. After Sobchak’s defeat in the elections and Putin’s departure to Moscow, the owners of “Russia” had reason to be depressed. The new mayor, Vladimir Yakovlev, did not offend his predecessor’s acquaintances; he simply had his own acquaintances for business purposes. While oligarchic oil and metallurgical empires were being built in the capital, the business of Rossiya shareholders could be described in one word - “vegetation.”

But a ray of light will shine even in the darkest kingdom. Between the summer of 1996 and Putin’s rise to power three years later, two important events occurred in the lives of “Russians.” Firstly, Kovalchuk, Yakunin, the brothers Fursenko and Myachin, together with Putin, became co-founders of the dacha cooperative “Ozero” and acquired country houses on the shores of Lake Komsomolskoye, a hundred kilometers from St. Petersburg. They entered, so to speak, into the inner circle of the future president. Secondly, at the end of 1997, the “old” owners of Rossiya formalized relations with a serious partner: 20% of the bank’s shares were acquired by the Finnish company IPP, associated with the Kinex oil trading group, and Kinex representative Andrei Katkov headed the board of directors of the bank.

Patience and perseverance paid off. According to Volodchenko, Putin and Kovalchuk had friendly relations in the 1990s. “They have known each other since Vladimir Putin worked in St. Petersburg,” confirms Dmitry Peskov, the prime minister’s press secretary. “Today they communicate less often due to Putin’s busy work schedule.” Access to the new president in one move turned out to be an extremely valuable asset for Kovalchuk.

In the summer of 2003, Severstal of Alexei Mordashov placed $20 million in Rossiya for an annual deposit at 1%. The following year, the steelmakers paid this amount for a 9% stake in Rossiya; the bank’s business was valued at $220 million, or 11.5 times capital, despite the fact that even at the height of the banking boom, no one paid more than 5 capital for Russian credit institutions. And last year, Surgutneftegaz bought preferred shares of Rossiya for 1.1 billion rubles. From these “prefs”, “Surgut” received 7 million rubles in dividends. Yield - 0.6% per annum. Severstal and Surgut helped the Russians buy out the REN TV television company from RAO UES.

In the matter of collecting money and assets, the owners of “Russia” will probably not yield to the oligarchs of Yeltsin’s call. But unlike the latter, the “Russians” do not delve into the business of the companies that they inherited. At most, they connect them to their social network. Sogaz remained a captive insurer and remains so. But now, in addition to Gazprom, which in 2006 accounted for 60% of the collected premiums, he insures Rosneft, Russian Railways, and nuclear industry enterprises. Kovalchuk does not interfere in the work of television channels either. The leading "news" of REN TV do not remember instructions regarding the content and tone of the programs that would come from the new owners. There are no “black lists” on the channel either: the same Milov and his co-author, former SPS party leader Boris Nemtsov, presented on REN TV a study on dubious transactions of the Putin era. They also talked about strange operations in which “Russia” was involved.

Is there a future for the business empire of the “Russians” in the post-Putin era? De jure, the Rossiya Bank group includes only two large companies, Sogaz and Leader, and a number of less significant assets in the field of real estate and finance. The main asset of “Leader” is a share in Gazprombank with its collection of industrial assets, but not a trace of control will remain if the legal owner, Gazfond, changes the management company. Meanwhile, the redistribution of former Gazprom property continues. Sibur is being prepared for sale to its managers, the future of Gazprombank should become clear by the end of the year, control over “nuclear” enterprises is formalized through a chain of offshore companies - their owners can change at any time without any publicity. Maybe the owners of Rossiya do not interfere in the work of their companies because control over them is entrusted to them only for a while?

The former director of LenASP Volodchenko has a small business: he sells watches. “We met with Kovalchuk two years ago,” says the entrepreneur. — He used to really like Rado. Now he probably wears Breguet or Patek Philippe.”

Yuri Kovalchuk. Senior in "Russia"