introducing Oleg Deripaska

The reason for the delay in putting up this post is that the story of Oleg Deripaska is a hugely complex one, and indeed his present position is very complicated. He has large borrowing debts, and is also embroiled in several legal disputes, at least one already going through the courts. He has enemies.

But let's start with the official background.  Deripaska is the head of the largest producer of aluminium and alumina in the world, Rusal.  Below is an excerpt from his company's website:

"Having raised his initial capital by trading in metals, Oleg Deripaska acquired shares in the Sayanogorsk Aluminium Smelter and became its Director General in 1994. In 1997, Mr. Deripaska initiated the creation of the Sibirsky Aluminium Group, which was Russia’s first vertically integrated industrial group. It brought together Russian leading aluminium and alloys producers and three years after its inception the Sibirsky Aluminium Group became one of the world's top ten producers of aluminum products. The Sibirsky Aluminium Group was renamed Basic Element in 2001.

In 2000-2003, Mr. Deripaska was Director General of Russian Aluminium (RUSAL), which was set up as a result of the combination of aluminium smelters and alumina refineries of the Sibirsky Aluminium Group and the Sibneft oil company. In 2007, RUSAL, the SUAL Group and alumina assets of Glencore International AG merged to create United Company RUSAL, the world's largest aluminium and alumina producer. Oleg Deripaska became Head of the United company in 2009."


This cool professional description of Deripaska's rise conveys nothing of  his climb out of  poverty and obscurity  to fight his way through a virtually lawless world of great danger - in which his life was frequently on the line - to finally survive and emerge one of the wealthiest and most  powerful men in Russia.

Deripaska's life story so far is the stuff of a great book - a page-turning thriller that, turned into a work of fiction, would look just that, fiction.  But it all happened. Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follet, Robert Harris,  Jeffrey Archer, where are you?

Oleg Deripaska is, in some ways, the most interesting of the Russian oligarchs.  The majority of them, generally speaking, are essentially money men.  Deripaska is an intellectual.  But an intellectual who rose to become, at one point, the richest man in Russia - tho' he's slipped a bit in the present financial climate.

He was born in  1968 and  grew up in a small rural village in  southern Russia with his widowed mother, and sometimes his grandparents when his mother, a clever woman and herself an engineer, was working in another city.  He graduated with honors in physics from Moscow State University in 1993, and in 1996 he got an economics degree from the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics.

But he soon saw that theoretical physics was not going to get him very far in the chaotic world of post Communist Russia. He tried his hand as a metal trader. And it was under the tumultuous reign of Boris Yeltsin that Deripaska begun his abrupt, and some say violent,  rise to wealth and power. Though in the chaotic conditions of a society in meltdown, it's clear that anyone who did  not defend themselves violently would simply not come out alive.

Among all the battles for control of state assets in 1990s, none were more violent and bloody than the so-called "aluminum wars" when organized-crime gangs hired by competing interests assassinated dozens of people, in the fight to control the smelters of the aluminium industry.   Executives, politicians and reporters were run over, shot, had their throats cut or died in mysterious air crashes. The worst fighting was said to be around the Krasnoyarsk plant in Siberia. They called it the "Wild East". Out of this bloodbath of corpses and bits of body parts, Deripaska emerged the winner. Maybe because he was a lot brighter than the physical heavies battling around him,  kept a very cool head, and held his nerve.

Deripaska himself says he owes his success to a lot of hard work. He certainly owes much of his success to great courage, boldness and brains.  One of his business associates is quoted as saying many people underestimated Deripaska. "He is one of the most intelligent people you've ever met,' he says, "and it's matched by ambition."

Early on, Deripaska understood that success in this new Russia would come from a mixture of  force, poltical influence and personal connnections. In 2001, he married Yeltsin's granddaughter.  He is very close to Putin, they go ski-ing together. Though rumour says there has been a little coolness of late - though it's possible that is just for public show.

And in 2004, Deripaska became pals with Lord Mandelson and the heir to the Rothschild dynasty, Nat, both of whom holidayed on his yacht.

Lord Mandelson himself has denied that, as the EU Trade commissioner, he gave trade concessions of up to £50m. a year to Russia's then richest man.  During his commissionership, there have been two cuts in EU aluminium import tariffs which have benefited Rusal by tens of millions of pounds a year.

  But these are complicated areas of negotiation and as David O’Sullivan, the European Commission’s director-general of European trade, has said: “Decisions regarding these cases have been taken in full transparency and are firmly rooted in EU law and in the interests of EU companies."