Roman Abramovich

Roman Abramovich got married for the first time in December 1987 to Olga Lysova and ended up divorcing her three years later. Four years later in 1991, he got married to a stewardess, Irina Malandina, and had five children from the marriage. The couple got divorced in 2007 when Roman started dating Dasha Zhukova and they got married in 2008 and have two children.

Roman Abramovich was born on 24th October 1966 at Saratov, Russia in a lower middle class family. He lost his parents soon after he was born. Thus, he was orphaned at the age of 2, so his uncle took him with him to Ukhta. Roman saw difficult times since a very early age and understood the value of money, which helped him to learn to save it and while a student, he started his very first venture in the form of a plastic toy making company.

Roman got drafted in by the Russian army while he was attending the industrial institute in Ukhta. He got bored of it and realized that it wasn’t his calling and as he returned back from the army, he started attending Moscow State Auto Transport Institute. He never quite finished his education and started concentrating on his goals to become rich as soon as possible.

His impeccable business sense allowed him to earn some good amount of profit from his early few ventures and Roman went on working further with his goal of making money.

Roman turned out to be lucky in a way that Russia was opening up to some major business and tax reforms in the late 80s when Roman was just starting up. With the money that he had saved thus far, he set up a plastic toy making company and started selling toys at a minimal profit from his small apartment. However small the profit turned out to be, it exhibited the impeccable business skills Roman possessed and after doing it for few more years, Roman realized it was time to move on to bigger things.

During 1992-1995, Roman understood the market with very keen eyes and invested in the right industries. He mostly narrowed down his focus on establishing resale companies which acted as intermediaries and earned him some good profits and soon after that, Roman focused his vision on oil companies. In 1995, he met Boris Berezovsky and the two partnered up for purchasing the controlling shares in the oil company ‘Sibneft’ at USD 100 millions.

During the time when Roman was acquiring the shares of the company, its net worth was estimated to be USD 150 millions and the share prices jumped up, making millions in profit for Roman and his partner. In the year 2000, Boris left the country after accusations of fraud and sold his shares to Roman, which further grew his empire.

After achieving mega success with Sibneft, Roman started eying the Russian Aluminium industry which was known to be a highly lucrative sector back in those times. The notorious aluminium war was ongoing and several murders were taking place for the acquisition of the industry, and when Roman took it over and applied his business sense, the crime stopped and he emerged out as the sole winner in the Russian ‘Aluminium War’.

In June 2003, Roman bought most of the companies that owned the Chelsea football club, which at that time was known as one of the weakest football teams. Under his reign, the club has performed well enough and Roman supports the team in almost its every match.

Roman Abramovich was appointed as the governor of Chukotka from 2000 to 2008 and during his tenure he spent close to a billion dollars on the welfare of the area. The business environment significantly improved in the region with the arrival of many investors and many schools and hospitals were built.

In 2003, Expert, a Russian business magazine named him the person of the year for his business expertise and works as the governor. President Dmitri Medvedev accepted Roman’s request to resign from the post, but said that the charitable activities started by Roman in his name will carry on.