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Mikhail Khodorkovsky Net Worth

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Net Worth in 2022: Personal Life, Career, Bio & Family

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Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a Russian businessman and philanthropist with a net worth of $100 million dollars.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky born June 26, 1963, in Moscow, Russia, USSR was imprisoned in 2003 on charges of fraud and tax cheating.

He was formerly Russia’s wealthiest man. Before being released in 2013, he was convicted of these and other crimes.

Khodorkovsky was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was raised in a middle-class family.

 His parents, both chemical engineers, instilled a passion for science in their kids. He was a member of the Komsomol and the Communist Party when he graduated from Moscow’s D. Mendeleyev Institute of Chemical Technology in 1986.

He sought a career in business after being rejected from graduate school.

During Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika campaign, private enterprise was encouraged, and Khodorkovsky enlisted the help of his Mendeleyev Institute and Komsomol colleagues on a number of projects.

Early and Personal Life:

 Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky was born on June 26, 1963, in Moscow. His parents, Boris and Marina, worked as engineers at a business that made measuring instruments.

His mother was a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, whereas his father was a devout Jew. His parents were anti-Communists, but they kept their feelings disguised from their kid, who grew up to be a Communist and a Soviet Union patriot.

In 1986, he graduated from Russia’s D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. At the time, we were the deputy head of the Communist Youth League or Komsomol.

He also met and married Yelena, a fellow student with whom he had a kid. After meeting another young student, Inna, he divorced his wife.

He courted her by waiting outside her apartment in his car until she agreed to date him. They married and had three children together after that. He also managed to maintain a healthy relationship with both his first wife, Yelena, and his first son.

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Career:

 Mikhail Khodorkovsky began his career by opening a café in 1986, but by the following year, he had extended his operations to encompass the import and export of computers and other goods.

He orchestrated the merger of many businesses into a single trading organization in 1988, which was later registered as a bank with an operating capital of roughly $8 million.

Menatep was one of the first privately owned banks in post-Soviet Russia, having been established in 1990.

Khodorkovsky made a fortune trading in foreign money and commodities when communism fell apart in 1991, but his most remarkable accomplishments were the purchase of assets originally held by the Soviet government.

Menatep and its spin-off holding company Rosprom bought controlling holdings in dozens of Russian industrial companies in the early 1990s.

At a privatization auction in 1995, Menatep paid $350 million for Yukos, Russia’s second-largest oil company. Despite not having submitted the highest price, Menatep won the auction.

This is due to the fact that Menatep was also in charge of the bidding process, and the highest proposal, made by a group of Russian banks, was rejected due to a questionable technicality.

Khodorkovsky was the richest person in Russia for a time as the head of Yukos, and he was one of the most visible members of a group of rash industrialists and bankers known as “the oligarchs.”

At the expense of Menatep’s creditors, he steered his increasing industrial empire through the national financial crisis of 1998. Menatep, like many other Russian private banks, fell insolvent when the Russian government depreciated the currency, and Khodorkovsky moved Menatep’s recoverable assets to one of his other companies.

As his public profile grew, he became a symbol of Russia’s emerging, more respectable business elite.

Khodorkovsky and the other oligarchs, on the other hand, had invested the bulk of their political capital in Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, and his abrupt retirement in 1999 left them without the government protection and accommodations they had enjoyed for the previous decade.

Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, worked hard to restrict the oligarchs’ influence, offering them a deal in July 2000: he would allow them full rein in their enterprises as long as they stayed out of politics.

Khodorkovsky rejected the deal and instead spent millions of dollars boosting Putin’s opponents and campaigning for Yukos-friendly legislation.

Yukos announced intentions to buy Russian oil company Sibneft in 2003, making it one of the world’s biggest oil producers and Russia’s largest business.

Khodorkovsky was imprisoned later that year on charges of fraud and tax evasion, putting a halt to his plans.

His trial continued until 2005 when he was found guilty of six of the seven charges leveled against him and given a nine-year sentence this was later reduced to eight years. Just before he was about to be released in 2007, Khodorkovsky was accused of embezzlement and money laundering.

The subsequent trial, like the one before it, was widely criticized for being politically motivated. In 2010, Khodorkovsky’s sentence was enhanced by seven years after he was found guilty.

On appeal in May 2011, the decision was upheld, although Khodorkovsky’s total sentence was lowered by one year, enabling him to be freed in 2016.

Despite Putin’s vilification of Khodorkovsky as an illustration of the oligarch period’s greatest excesses, his detention became a symbol for Russian democracy reformers.

After more than a decade in jail, Khodorkovsky was released in December 2013. His amnesty was part of a larger amnesty in advance of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague ruled in July 2014 that Russia had illegally stolen Yukos assets as part of a political vendetta against Khodorkovsky.

Despite the fact that Khodorkovsky was not a party to the case, Russia was ordered to pay Yukos shareholders $51 billion in damages in one of the largest international arbitration rulings in history.

However, in 2016, a Dutch court overturned the decision, ruling that the PCA lacked jurisdiction.

Following his release, Khodorkovsky left Russia and became a vociferous opponent of Putin. Russia issued an international arrest order for Khodorkovsky in 2015, accusing him of organizing the murder of a Siberian mayor in 1998, among other things.

He denied the accusations. A documentary on Khodorkovsky’s life, Citizen K, was published in 2019.

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What Is the Exiled Russian Billionaire’s Net Worth?

 Mikhail’s first work after graduation was with the Komsomol, which was the typical path for anyone seeking a career in Soviet politics.

Rather than working his way up the corporate ladder to become a manager, he proved to be a skilled businessman, using his Komsomol contacts to help create his first company, a café, in 1986.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky also established relationships with important organizations, enabling him and his friends to launch Bank Menatep, one of Russia’s first privately owned banks, in 1989.

The bank flourished quickly, and he was granted responsibility by the government to oversee funds put aside for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Arrest and Prosecution:

Khodorkovsky, who was formerly a member of the political elite, had a falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had him imprisoned and charged with fraud in 2003. This had an effect on not just Khodorkovsky, but also Yuko’s oil industry, which saw a huge decline once its shares were frozen.

Khodorkovsky was found guilty of his alleged crimes in May 2005 and sentenced to nine years in prison. During his incarceration, he was accused of embezzlement and money laundering, and his sentence was lengthened.

President Putin did not pardon Khodorkovsky until Hans-Dietrich Genscher lobbied for his release. Khodorkovsky was freed from jail in December 2013.

 The foreign press and governments harshly criticized Khodorkovsky’s trial and imprisonment, with many assuming that his punishment was politically motivated.

He filed a slew of complaints with the European Court of Human Rights, claiming a number of instances of Russian human rights violations.

Despite the fact that the court identified several violations, the court ultimately ruled that the trial and arrest were not politically motivated.

Following his release from prison, Khodorkovsky moved to Switzerland before eventually settling in London in 2015.

Despite the fact that his money had plummeted as a consequence of the scandal surrounding his arrest and time in prison, he was still a rich man by any measure, and his fortune surged when he moved to London.

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Open Russia:

In the early 2000s, Khodorkovsky launched Open Russia with the goal of creating a foundation to promote Russia’s civic society.

He resurrected Open Russian as a statewide community site in 2014, much to the fury of President Putin and the Kremlin.

The organization advocates for free and independent media, the rule of law, political education, and increased support for political detainees.

 They want to see significant changes implemented in Russia in the future, such as those aimed at law enforcement and elections.

Open Russia, according to Khodorkovsky, may act as a conduit for a constitutional convention that will move power from the president to the legislative and judiciary.

Open Russia was designated as an undesirable organization by Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office in 2017, thereby outlawing it and all of its connected activity in the nation.

In the same year, it was added to Russia’s list of forbidden websites. Fearing criminal prosecution, Khodorkovsky said that Open Russia would formally cease operations in Russia in 2021, but will continue to operate elsewhere in the world.

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