Yesterday, Roman Abramovich said that he was going to sell Chelsea Football Club, the English soccer team he’s owned since 2003. Pressure from the West has forced Russia’s oligarchs to give up their most valuable assets, like Chelsea.
Abramovich said that the money from the sale will go to “help all the people who have been hurt by the war in Ukraine.” He’s said to be asking for at least $2.5 billion.
There must be something wrong with this word.
There has been a lot of talk about the term in the last few days, so we should give it a definition: In general, an oligarch is a wealthy person who has a lot of power in society. An oligarchy is a type of government that has a few (often corrupt) oligarchs who have a lot of power.
There is a lot of talk about them in Russia.
What do you need to do in order to answer this question? In the years after it was over, the country that is now known as Russia started to sell off many of the valuable things that the government owned during its communist days.
It was like a game of Monopoly when we were the banker and these auctions were rigged. If you had political connections, you could buy very valuable businesses at very low prices. Abramovich’s storey shows how many oligarchs made their money.
He bought a 50% stake in Siberian Oil Co. (Sibneft, for short) for about $100 million in 1995. Later, he bought a majority stake in Sibneft for a lot more money.
ten years after that, Gazprom bought Sibneft for more than $13 billion. Abramovich made about $10 billion from the sale.
There are many oligarchs who have been banned by the West recently, but Abramovich is not one of them, and he has always denied having any kind of relationship with Vladimir Putin. It’s clear that he thinks he’ll be next on the Western countries’ hit list when they try to get their hands on the luxury goods of Russian billionaires.
And those seizures have started, too, so far. Alisher Usmanov’s 512-foot megayacht is said to have been taken over by German authorities in the port city of Hamburg.