Who Has the Biggest Bucks
In last year’s edition of Kommersant-Rating, we published the names of the nine officially wealthiest Russians. At the time we noted a new trend: Russia’s most successful businessmen had stopped being afraid of revealing their income. This year, an unforeseen force in the form of law enforcement agencies interfered in the contest of the wealthy. Four of the nine brave souls are involved in the YUKOS affair. Incidentally, the head of YUKOS was also the winner in our rating of heads of Russian companies who made the greatest profit in the year.
 |
| Aleksei Kudenko |
| It will be a long time before it will be possible to estimate the largest Russian fortunes with any kind of accuracy. At present, Russia’s leading businessmen show only as much money as they have to. The only way to compare them with one another is by this visible tip of the iceberg |
We would like to hope that all this is just an unpleasant coincidence and that special investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office will not take our rating of businessmen as a guide for their operations. We will try to be optimistic and look at things in the following way: most of the people in our previous rating of most successful businessmen did not receive a summons to the Prosecutor General’s Office; thus, most of the people in our new rating have nothing to fear. Let us hope that the newcomers to our rating of officially wealthiest businessmen (24 people in all) also have nothing to fear.
In contrast to the previous year, in the present review, we have devoted a separate section to banks (and their managers of course), which our experts have divided into different categories of winners (most profitable banks, most retail-oriented banks, banks with the largest corporate accounts, and largest credit banks).
In this section, we also present Kommersant-Dengi’s traditional ratings, i.e., “Russia’s 200 largest banks” and “Leading Russian business people by volume of controlled funds.”
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 12, 2004
|
