Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich was born on October 24, 1966 in Saratov. His father, Arkady Nakhimovich Abramovich, worked in Syktyvkar as a supply worker in one of the construction departments, his mother, Irina Vasilievna, was a certified musician. Orphaned in infancy.

Information about the death of his parents is contradictory: Abramovich himself said that his mother died of leukemia when he was about a year old, and his father’s legs were broken by a falling crane boom at a construction site. After the death of his parents, he lived for a short time with his grandmother, Tatyana Semyonovna, in Syktyvkar, and then in the same 1969 he moved to Ukhta (Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) to live with his father’s brother, Leib Nakhimovich Abramovich, who worked as the head of the labor supply department of the Pechorles logging enterprise.

In 1973 he went to the first grade of Ukhta school No. 2. In 1974 he moved to his second uncle, Abram Nakhimovich Abramovich, in Moscow, where in 1983 he graduated from school No. 232 with a theatrical focus. After school, I tried to enter one of the Moscow universities, but did not pass the competition. Having moved to relatives in Komi, he entered the Ukhta Industrial Institute, which he left after several months of study.

Since 1984, he served in a vehicle platoon in an artillery regiment in Kirzhach, Vladimir region. After the army, from January 1987, he worked in the construction and installation department No. 122 of the Mospetsmontazh trust as the head of a welding unit. At the same time, he entered the evening department of the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute, where he studied for six months in the specialty “Cars. Automotive industry".

In December 1987, he married Olga Yuryevna Lysova, who already had a daughter from her first marriage. According to media reports, Roman Abramovich got a job at the Uyut cooperative, which produced children's toys that soon flooded the country. In 1991, he married flight attendant Irina Vyacheslavovna Malandina. In this marriage they had five children - Anna, Arkady, Sonya, Arina and Ilya. In the same year, he became director of the Moscow small enterprise AVK, which was engaged in the resale of petroleum products.

On June 19, 1992, he was arrested (unconfirmed data) in Moscow on charges of stealing 55 tanks of diesel fuel from the Ukhta Oil Refinery in the amount of 3.8 million rubles. On December 1, 1992, after the damage to the refinery was compensated, the case was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti.

In 1993, he began selling oil from the city of Noyabrsk. In the same year, I met Boris Berezovsky on Pyotr Aven’s yacht, where they ended up at the invitation of Alfa-Bank executives. Together with Berezovsky, he created the offshore company Runicom Ltd., registered in Gibraltar, and headed the Moscow branch of the Swiss company Runicom SA. Since 1994, he was a broker at the first Russian Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange and traded petroleum products.

In May 1995, Abramovich and Berezovsky created P.K.-Trust CJSC, and Abramovich subsequently established several more companies: Mekong CJSC, Centurion-M CJSC, Agrofert LLC, Multitrans CJSC, Multitrans CJSC Oilimpex", CJSC Sibreal, CJSC Forneft, CJSC Servet, CJSC Branko, LLC Vector-A.

Over the next two years, the companies controlled by Abramovich, Financial Oil Company LLC, Refine Oil CJSC and Sinks Firm CJSC, were the winners of investment competitions for the privatization of shares in the Sibneft oil company.

In June 1996, he joined the board of directors of Sibneft's main production division, Noyabrskneftegaz JSC, and headed the Moscow representative office of Sibneft. Since September 1996 - member of the board of directors of Sibneft.

On November 26, 1998, the former head of the Presidential Security Service, Alexander Korzhakov, said at a press conference that Abramovich is the treasurer of President Yeltsin’s inner circle and, in particular, pays the bills of President Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. On July 13, 1999, Umar Dzhabrailov’s advertising agency ATOR placed two billboards in Moscow on Kutuzovsky Prospekt with a photograph of Abramovich and the text “Roma is thinking about the family. The family is thinking about Roma. Congratulations! PS Roma chose a cool place.” This moment can well be considered the beginning of Roman Abramovich’s public fame. The posters were removed at the request of the Sibneft company.

In December 1999, he won the elections to the State Duma in the Chukotka single-mandate electoral district No. 223, gaining 59.78% of the vote (his closest rival, Vladimir Etylin, received 20.01%). He was a member of the Duma Committee on Problems of the North and Far East.

In 2000 he graduated from the Moscow State Law Academy. In the spring of the same year, together with Oleg Deripaska, he created the Russian Aluminum company, in which businessmen combined their aluminum assets. On December 24, 2000, he won the gubernatorial elections in Chukotka, gaining 90.61% of the votes, and therefore resigned as deputy in January 2001. In the same month, he acted as an intermediary in the sale of shares of the ORT television channel to the state by Boris Berezovsky. In March 2001, he donated $18 million from his own funds to improve the living conditions of Chukotka residents.

On May 29 of the same year, he was summoned for questioning by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office as part of investigative actions in a criminal case against the leaders of Sibneft. The case was initiated at the request of State Duma deputies based on the act of the Accounts Chamber on the privatization of Sibneft, according to which the company was sold at approximately 25 times lower than its real value. In August, the case was closed for lack of evidence of a crime.

In June, Forbes magazine included Abramovich for the first time in the list of the richest people on the planet with a fortune of $1.4 billion. On October 24, it became officially known that the investment company Millhouse Capital, registered in London, received management of all the assets that belonged to Abramovich. On July 1, 2003, he bought a controlling stake in the English football club Chelsea, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, and settled in the UK, while remaining a taxpayer of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.

In 2003, Sibneft tried to merge with the oil company YUKOS into a single holding YUKSI, but the deal fell through after the arrest of Khodorkovsky and tax claims against YUKOS. In January 2004, the Accounts Chamber began checking the budget of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and at the same time the Sibneft company for the payment of taxes. In March, the Russian Ministry of Taxes and Duties filed tax claims against Sibneft for 2000–2001 in the amount of about $1 billion. In May 2004, the Accounts Chamber declared the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug bankrupt.

In October, Millhouse Capital sold the last shares of Russian Aluminum to Oleg Deripaska's company Basic Element. In January 2005, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development accused Abramovich of misappropriating a loan worth $17 million. The case never came to trial. In March 2005, Forbes named Abramovich the richest man in Russia, estimating his fortune at $13.3 billion.

In September 2005, Millhouse sold a controlling stake in Sibneft to Gazprom for $13.1 billion. In October 2005, he was re-elected governor of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. On January 20, 2006, he was awarded the Order of Honor “for his great contribution to the socio-economic development of the Autonomous Okrug.” In October 2006, Abramovich's wife Irina filed for divorce. The reason, according to the media, was her husband’s too close relationship with Daria Zhukova, the daughter of businessman Alexander Zhukov. On March 14, 2007, the parties reached an agreement on the division of property. Irina, according to various sources, received from $300 million to much larger sums.

On December 20, 2006, he first turned to the president, then Vladimir Putin, with a request to terminate the powers of the governor, but after a personal meeting with him he changed his mind. On July 3, 2008, the new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev accepted Abramovich's resignation as governor of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.

On October 12, 2008, he was elected as a deputy in the by-elections of the Chukotka District Duma (he received 96.99% of the votes), and on October 22, he was approved as chairman of the regional parliament. The evolution of Abramovich's fortune according to the Forbes rating: 2001 - $1.4 billion, 2005 - $13.3 billion (first line in the Russian Forbes list, 2006 - $18.2 billion (first line), 2007 - $19.2 billion, 2008 - $20.5 billion (second place after Oleg Deripaska).

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