When the stock market soured last year and banks were scrambling to meet margin calls on their outsized loans, one recent entrant to the Russian credit market managed to escape unscathed.

Oleg Tinkov, the flamboyant founder of Tinkoff restaurants and owner of Tinkoff Credit Systems bank, said his lending business was booming amid the recession and expects large profits this year. The recipe is simple — cost reduction and a responsible debt policy — but it’s a formula he learned the hard way, barely scraping through the 1998 financial collapse.

“We’ll earn a lot this year,” Tinkov said in an interview with The Moscow Times. “I think Tinkoff Credit Systems’ profits to international financial reporting standards will top $18 million to $20 million this year, and our revenue is roughly $120 million.”

The lender, which previously has only released results to Russian financial reporting standards, has issued 100,000 credit cards since October 2008, bringing its total to 400,000 since it began operating in August 2007. But Tinkov almost immediately began bracing for recession after a debt issue that year largely fell flat.

“We experienced the crisis right from the very beginning, when most Russian bankers were ignoring the signs of the deepening global recession and our leaders were calling Russia ‘an island of stability,’” he said. “When we started to float our ruble bonds in 2007, we barely managed to place 20 percent of them, and that was when we realized that the global economy was going down.”

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin first called Russia “an island of stability” in January 2008, saying interest in the country’s economy would be on the rise as the United States faltered and growth slowed in developed markets. The phrase was later picked up by other politicians, including President Dmitry Medvedev.

Tinkoff Credit Systems had assets of 5.64 billion rubles ($194 million) as of the second quarter, according to the Interfax-100 bank rankings, making it Russia’s 244th largest lender. The bank prides itself on its relatively small size, which Tinkov said allows it to keep management efficient and costs low.

“I recently ran into a colleague of mine, a banker, who said he was paying $9 million a month for offices,” he said. “Our costs are several times lower, even though our revenue is quite comparable.”

Tinkov says running a “small business” like his is the best opportunity to earn in a crisis-hit economy. “Women often think it’s bad when your size is small,” he said. “But when it comes to doing business, being small is cool and sexy because it’s profitable.”

He also blamed other banks’ woes on less responsible lending practices.

“You should, of course, take loans, but do it responsibly. The debt-to-profit ratio is what matters,” he said. “It’s not right when my colleagues borrowed at 10 times EBITDA.”

The reliance on EBITDA — or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — doesn’t sit well with Tinkov, both for economic and personal reasons. “I wouldn’t consider EBITDA, it’s not right. You should consider net profit,” he said. “A debt equal to two or three times net profit is good, but calculations using EBITDA are not precise. Besides, EBITDA sounds like foul language to me.”

EBITDA, if pronounced by Russian speaker, sounds similar to one of the language’s most obscene words.

Tinkov traces the start of his business career to Petrosib, a St. Petersburg-based home appliances retailer. In 1998 he founded Daria, a frozen-food producer that focused on pelmeni, the ubiquitous Russian dumpling.

“I really suffered in 1998, lost tons of money. And I remember hiding from some gangsters in St. Petersburg, who literally wanted to kick some debts out of me,” he said. “Since then, I decided never to spend too much and always to be in the savings mode, so to speak. That’s one of the reasons why I’m still driving my six-year-old Range Rover.”

He sold off Daria to a holding controlled by Roman Abramovich in 2001 to concentrate on his newest projects: eponymous breweries and a restaurant chain.

The company began as one St. Petersburg microbrewery in 1998, but eventually expanded to include beer bottling for retail and a national restaurant chain. He sold the main brewery operations to Sun InBev for $201 million in 2005 and would have sold the restaurants too, if it wanted them. “They simply didn’t need them,” he said.

Last month, Tinkov finally sold his 75 percent stake in the restaurant chain to Mint Capital, a Scandinavian private equity firm that paid $10 million for a 25 percent stake in August 2008. “I’m an extremely irrational businessman, if I were rational, I would be rich. But now I’m just well off,” he said. “I was working on the Tinkoff restaurant business for 11 years, but if you look at my track record, you’ll see that I always built and sold each of my businesses within three to five years. I got stuck a little bit with the restaurant business.

He finally decided to leave because of differences of opinion with his partners and had left management of the company to his partners recently. He declined to discuss the exact terms of the deal, saying he was not at liberty to discuss the sale and would in any event be “ashamed” to disclose the sum.

“Imagine, they bought 25 percent for $10 million in 2008, and now they bought 75 percent for an even smaller amount,” he said. “Well, I don’t think that’s a big problem. It makes no difference to me, whether I’ve got a million more or a million less in my pocket. But it wasn’t a super deal.”

Tinkov said he would also be selling his banking business in the future — as soon as it was developed enough. The lender is focused on credit cards and has no brick-and-mortar branches.

“This is a project that’s for sale, and I’ll sell it within five years from today, maybe even three, we’ll see,” he said. “I already have people who are interested in it. Even now with the recession in progress somebody’s calling and asking me to sell it. But I won’t for now, as my business hasn’t gained volume yet.”

He said Goldman Sachs, which owns a 15 percent stake in Tinkoff Credit Systems, fully agreed that it was too early to sell the business. Goldman Sachs declined comment.

But Tinkov — whose web site says he is “the Russian Richard Branson,” after the colorful Virgin billionaire — says his days of industry hopping are largely over. “I was selling home appliances, pelmeni, beer, I used to open restaurants. But money was always a small part of my business,” he said. “In this sector, money is 100 percent of my business, and I’m loving it. It’s so sexy to enter a bank’s armored vault and see all these loads of cash piled on the floor.”