... Unicor Group last week. Gutseriyev will be the final owner of the Kauchuk rubber plant territory in Ochakovo and the Summit multifunctional complex, which houses the InterContinental Moscow Tverskaya hotel, a shopping mall and a business center. The billionaire is also taking over the reconstruction of the former Tsentralnaya Hotel in central Moscow. Ivanishvili had earlier promised to restore the building's historic features and its old name Lyuks Hotel. The ownership of the elite residential complex...

President Vladimir Putin on Friday appointed a confidant of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov as the acting governor of the Irkutsk region, where the metals magnate has a large gold-mining operation and other businesses. President Vladimir Putin on Friday appointed a confidant of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov...

... Indian and an Israeli, the three-week-long World Chess Championship match now going on in Moscow also provides a glimpse of the weird and politically connected Russian chess scene. Attendees at the opening ceremony in the Tretyakov Gallery included billionaire oil traders, Kremlin insiders, world-class musicians and an alien abductee. The World Championship match features the reigning titleholder, India's Viswanathan Anand, against Boris Gelfand, the Minsk-born grandmaster who emigrated to Israel...

Billionaire Alisher Usmanov has taken steps to bring Scartel and its mobile data provider brand Yota under his wing and closer to MegaFon by signing an agreement with Scartel shareholders to take control through a co-owned holding company. Billionaire...

The highest-ranking woman in the new government spent eight years working for billionaire former presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov, sparking speculation — in lieu of his absence — that she might be his "representative" in the government. Vedomosti Golodets The highest-ranking woman in...

Facebook has successfully completed the biggest tech IPO in history, raising $16 billion and making billionaires of its founders and early investors and millionaires of many of its employees. And miraculously, this was achieved in a market that is quickly heading south, as fears and emotions escalate against the backdrop of a possible Grexit from the...

TBILISI, Georgia — Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili has sold his Russian bank Rossiyskiy Kredit Bank to a group of private investors for $352 million, his management company Unikor group said in a statement on Thursday. Ivanishvili, a once reclusive tycoon whose wealth is...

Russian billionaires are famous for being big buyers of contemporary art, bolstering sales in capitals across the West, but at home it's a different story. Russian billionaires are famous for being big buyers of contemporary art...

... results were boosted by higher Internet usage and better control of costs. Subscriber numbers grew 5 percent year on year to 55.6 million, though they fell 3 percent on the previous quarter. VimpelCom is part owned by Altimo, the telecoms arm of Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group, Norway’s Telenor and Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris’s Weather Investments. Lunder said he was hoping VimpelCom would win one of the 4G licenses due to be awarded in Russia. In May, Russia launched...

... operations in the country were suspended. Cellular operator Mobile TeleSystems says it is returning to the isolated Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan almost 1 1/2 years after its operations in the country were suspended. Vladimir Yevtushenkov, billionaire chairman of the holding company that owns MTS, said in a statement broadcast on Turkmen state television Thursday that services would be resumed within three to six months. A deal agreed Wednesday between Yevtushenkov and Turkmenistan’s...

... investors. Russian five-year credit default swap prices are also lower than the iTraxx SovX CEEMEA Index, which includes countries as such as Hungary and Ukraine, and now trades at 278 points. Reuters StarMine's implied rating for Sistema, co-owned by billionaire chairman Vladimir Yevtushenkov, stood at BB+ on Wednesday, higher than its corporate credit ratings from Fitch and Standard & Poor's of BB- and BB, respectively. The StarMine rating does not take government or shareholder support into consideration...

... Rem Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, presented his plans to convert an abandoned Moscow restaurant into a new art space for the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, founded by Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova — whose partner is the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich — founded Garage as a contemporary-art nonprofit organization in Moscow in 2008. Earlier this year, Garage left its base in the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage for Moscow's Gorky Park, where the ruined 1960s restaurant, a modernist...

... months later he accepted from Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev the portfolio of the minister in charge of relations with the expert community, a job that had never existed before. His supersonic rise through Russia's political firmament was puzzling. Billionaire Abyzov showed no appetite for politics before. One thing that may have helped to catapult Abyzov into civil service is his affinity for all things high-tech, which he shares with Medvedev. "What makes them close outside of politics?"...

... on a local level, mainly focusing on the issue of corruption, which seems to resonate with voters the most. Aside from the grassroots opposition, Putin also has to deal with the varying groups of the political elite. Some of their leaders, such as billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and influential former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, appear to be positioning themselves for a long-term political campaign. While they maintain relatively open relationships with Putin, they are also in touch with the...

... softball questions on a series of lucrative investments by his wife. Shuvalov, 45, came under pressure in March from reports in the Western press that his wife, Olga, had netted more than $100 million from a series of investment deals involving Russian billionaires. He has admitted to the deals but said they were all legal and did not pose any conflicts of interest. “You can be sure that in all my years of government service I have not allowed a conflict of interest to arise,” Shuvalov...

... which the newspaper published Friday. He compared the data on chamber members, who include well-known businessmen, actors and public leaders, to the information given to foreign intelligence agents. According to the report, the Kremlin believes that billionaire Vladimir Potanin should not be re-elected to the Public Chamber for not taking an active role, while Yaroslav Kuzminov, president of the Higher School of Economics and husband of acting Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina, has...

... have indicated that they don't have anyone they can rely on in Samara, said Loboiko, the political analyst. In a sign that Merkushkin might lack local support, Loboiko said the acting governor has no links to the two main business groups in the region, billionaire Viktor Vekselberg's investment arm Renova and Russian Technologies, headed by Putin ally Sergei Chemezov. Merkushkin, who ruled Mordovia since 1995 and is a protege of Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vyacheslav Volodin, also will not be popular...

... lacking a legitimately elected mayor, senators or Duma deputies, it is unclear who is able to respond to the demands of the Moscow protesters. The process would be much simpler if there were elected public officials. Exacerbating this trap for Putin is billionaire and former presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov. He came in second place in Moscow in the presidential vote, attracting millions of Muscovites' votes, but he remains silent concerning their demands. At the same time, Putin has nobody...

... champions of Europe Saturday night. Lots of money, lots of luck and players who didn't care about winning ugly, just so long as they won, turned Chelsea into the champions of Europe Saturday night. The money, of course, is Roman Abramovich's. The billionaire finally got his hands on the shiny trophy with big ears he so coveted. A bargain at £800 million ($1.2 billion) and counting. That's roughly how much of his wealth the Russian has poured into the London club he bought in 2003, filling...

... when aluminum markets are weak. Deripaska's dreams of a megamerger with the $14 billion stake purchase four years ago, financed through debt, were dashed when the global crisis struck. RusAl was forced into a debt restructuring, and shareholder and billionaire Viktor Vekselberg urged Deripaska to sell the Norilsk stake, now worth $7.9 billion based on Reuters calculations. Net debt rose 0.7 percent to $11.13 billion at the end of March from December, RusAl said in its earnings statement. The company...