The fortune of Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch, has increased by $830 million since the beginning of the year and his total net worth hit $6 billion as of Feb. 1, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of world’s richest people.
Akhmetov’s fortune rose primarily due to an increase in the estimated value of his main assets. According to Bloomberg, as of Feb. 1, Akhmetov’s mining company Metinvest is worth $3.45 billion, while his energy holding DTEK is worth $1.8 billion.
Akhmetov is the only Ukrainian in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks the net worth of 500 of the richest people in the world.
The 52-year old Ukrainian oligarch’s wealth comes from the country’s energy sector. System Capital Management or SCM for short, owned in full by Akhmetov, is Ukraine’s largest industrial holding. The subsidiaries of SCM include Metinvest and DTEK, which produce over 80 percent of Ukraine’s steel, coal and thermal energy.
Added to that, Akhmetov owns Ukrtelecom, Ukraine’s fixed phone monopolist and the Ukraina Media Group, with the country’s most watched TV channel – Ukraina. His real estate portfolio includes the Central Department Store on Khreshchatyk Street, the Opera Hotel near the Kyiv Opera, and other buildings in the nation’s capital with a combined worth of over $400 million.
Questions over how Akhmetov amassed his great wealth abound. Under the presidency of the ousted former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Akhmetov was able to acquire multiple high-value assets during state privatization, and according to Bloomberg boosted his total net worth to over $22 billion in 2013, becoming a monopolist in some crucial sectors of the economy.
After Yanukovych, in whom Akhmetov was heavily invested, was removed from office through the Euromaidan revolution, and with Crimea and Donetsk occupied by Russia, Akhmetov’s fortune shrank dramatically.
However, Akhmetov was able to rebuild his wealth, which now surpasses the pre-Yanukovych numbers.
The Rotterdam+ benchmark introduced in 2015, which indexes the price of Ukrainian coal to its price in the Netherlands, plus the cost of transportation to and from Rotterdam, has earned DTEK huge dividends, increasing the prices of coal and in turn household energy prices.
