Yury Kovalchuk

Yury Valentinovich Kovalchuk (Russian: Ю́рий Валенти́нович Ковальчу́к; born 25 July 1951) is a Russian billionaire businessman and financier who is "reputed to be Vladimir Putin's personal banker".[1] The May 2008 issue of Russian Forbes listed him for the first time in its Golden Hundred of Russia's richest, calling him and another new entrant to the List, Gennady Timchenko, "good acquaintances of Vladimir Putin."[2] The magazine placed him at number 53 on the Russians-only list, with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion. After sanctions imposed on Kovalchuk in 2018, this dropped to $650 million.[3]

From 1987 to 1991, he was the first deputy director of Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute. Since 2004, he has been chair of Rossiya Bank and its largest shareholder.[4][5][6]

Since the early 1990s, Kovalchuk has owned a dacha in Solovyovka in the Priozersky District of the Leningrad region, located on the eastern shore of the Komsomolskoye lake on the Karelian Isthmus near Saint Petersburg. His neighbours there are Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Yakunin, Andrei Fursenko, Sergey Fursenko, Viktor Myachin, Vladimir Smirnov and Nikolay Shamalov. Together they instituted the co-operative society Ozero (the Lake) which united their properties on 10 November 1996.[7][8][5]

His elder brother Mikhail Kovalchuk is the scientific secretary of the Council for Science and High Technologies attached to the president of the Russian Federation.

In 2015, Yury Kovalchuk's National Media Group (NMG) and US Discovery Channel joined forces to form Media Alliance of which NMG owns 80%.[9] Later that year, Kovalchuk acquired the rights to Ted Turner’s Russian assets including the Russian version of CNN, Cartoon Network and Boomerang. The reason for the sale was based on the Russian media ownership law that limits ownership of Russian media by foreigners.[10]

In 2017, Kovalchuk purchased the century-old Novy Svet vineyard in Crimea for $26.4 million in one of the first privatization deals in the region since the annexation of the region by Russia.[11]

As of January 2019, Kovalchuk and Nikolai Shamalov through their ownership of Rossiya Bank have become the most important investors in Russia's development of annexed Crimea.[12]

In 2020, the world's leading streaming entertainment service Netflix partnered with Kovalchuk's National Media Group to launch a local-language streaming service in Russia.[13]