Richest man

Chapter 9 Europe: Khodorkovsky (1)
— Khodorkovsky in prison in 2004 Khodorkovsky: A Dream of Two Worlds The Last Beat

In 2002, on the China Rich List, a Dutch Chinese man named Yang Bin ended his dream of wealth: this 9-year-old man with 43 million US dollars was suspected of false capital contribution, illegal occupation of agricultural land, contract fraud, and financial forgery. He was sentenced to 6 years in prison for 18 crimes, including tickets and suspected bribery of units.

People lament that 9 million wealth will be wiped out in one day.However, if the time is postponed for another 3 years, in today's increasingly developed media, when it becomes a fact that wealth evaporated by 130 billion US dollars in just one year, what kind of emotion can we make?
On the night of March 2005, 3, when many billionaires were looking for their names on the Forbes 11 Global Rich List just announced, Khodorkovsky, who was two years younger than Yang Bin, could only Moscow's "Sailor's Silence" detention center reads a newspaper provided by the prison warden.As if it were a dream, this person who owned 2005 billion US dollars in 2004 not only lost his freedom, but also left only 152 billion US dollars in wealth - no one like him in just one year, Bury your own empire.

The facts seem to be even crueler. After "Forbes" announced the list, Khodorkovsky's lawyers believe that Khodorkovsky's current net worth is estimated to be less than 1 million U.S. dollars-he is no longer a The beneficiary of the Menatep Group founded by himself is no longer the shareholder of Yukos, which ultimately killed him.In other words, a person who had $152 billion a year ago now only has assets of $1 million.

"A negative teaching material that cannot adapt to changes in the rules of the game." China's "Global Entrepreneur" magazine commented on the former richest man in Russia.

But in our opinion, the rapidly failing Mikhail Khodorkovsky has never acknowledged Putin's rules of the game—he has been trying to make the rules himself in a new field.He drifts between two worlds, one is his own economic empire, in which he is considered a dictator; the other is someone else's political empire, in which he is considered a provocateur and threat.He is trying to find a fulcrum between the two worlds and use his economic empire to change Russian politics.

That's the real reason for his downfall.

We can also regard him as the last specimen of the Russian oligarchic economy. In this country once controlled by the seven oligarchs, Khodorkovsky became the last one of the seven oligarchs to be drained, and he fell worse than Others are more dramatic, more of a "martyr" flavor.After all, he was once regarded as the most pragmatic and politically wise of the seven oligarchs.

"Just as we have no right to enjoy wealth without creating wealth, we also have no right to enjoy happiness without creating happiness." This sentence of the 19th century British playwright Bernard Shaw seems to be a reflection of the fate of these Russian oligarchs.

his two lives
It is now clear that Khodorkovsky once split his economic empire just as he tried to control both worlds.

From his birth in 1963 to the beginning of 2000, it can be considered as Khodorkovsky's first life.

In 1963, Khodorkovsky was born in an ordinary collective apartment in Moscow, his parents were engineers.Maybe it was because his parents both worked in factories. His ideal at that time was to be the director of a Soviet factory.Because he often expressed his thoughts to his peers, when he was five years old, his friends gave him the nickname "factory manager".

The young Khodorkovsky had an amazing talent for earning money. He once helped a candy company load and unload goods to earn pocket money. When he was studying at the Mendeev Institute of Chemical Engineering, he also held an ax to guard the payroll on the Trans-Siberian Railway. , worked as a mechanic in a factory, and his income was even higher than that of his father.

At the age of 23, Khodorkovsky almost embarked on an official career. In this year, he became the deputy secretary of the Moscow Frunze District Committee of the Communist Youth League.No one can tell now why he chose this job, whether it is because he really leans towards politics or because he hopes to get rich through politics, just like some years later. But whatever the reason, almost everything about Khodorkov The records of how Ski obtained his first fortune in his early years are believed to be inseparable from his work in the Communist Youth League.At that time, the Communist Youth League of the Soviet Union began to allow members to start businesses, exempt from taxes and keep profits.

After graduating from university in 1986, Khodorkovsky, who was close to the water, founded a coffee shop with five or six partners. After failing, he established the "Youth Science and Technology Creation Center". The factory sold new technologies, consulted, resold imported PCs (later assembled by himself), and even resold French brandy, completing his first accumulation of wealth.Khodorkovsky said that many of the clients at the time were even government agencies in the former Soviet Union.In fact, the "Youth Science and Technology Creation Center" was the Minatep Technology and Trade Co., Ltd. founded by Khodorkovsky. The company began to deal in Cuban brown sugar, a traditional daily consumer product of the Soviets at that time.At that time, there was a barter trade between Cuba and Cuba. Khodorkovsky provided Cuba with Soviet oil in exchange for brown sugar.According to legend, Khodorkovsky won this trade opportunity after giving a lot of benefits to those who were in charge of foreign trade in the country at that time.

Khodorkovsky's wealth-generating wisdom is unparalleled.In addition to trade, he began to use the support of the Communist Youth League to obtain a lot of benefits.In the late 80s, the Soviet Union had two currencies: one was cash; the other was "non-cash credit", which was actually a virtual currency issued by the government to factories and enterprises as subsidies.Nominally, "cashless credit" cannot be redeemed for cash.With the support of the Komsomol, Khodorkovsky was allowed to receive "non-cash credits" from his factory customers, deposited in banks and withdrawn in cash.Khodorkovsky then used the cash rubles to buy hard currencies such as dollars.It is said that in less than two years, Huo's annual income reached 8000 million rubles (equivalent to 1.3 million U.S. dollars at the official exchange rate at the time, and 1000 million U.S. dollars at the black market exchange rate), and he was promoted to the second secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Youth League. .

The late 80s were years of good fortune for Khodorkovsky. At the beginning of 1988, Khodorkovsky got acquainted with a man named Grubovich, whose parents both worked in the Soviet Bank and had prominent official positions.In 1989, when the economic reforms of the Soviet Union started and the regulation of commercial banks began to be relaxed, Khodorkovsky founded Menatep Bank through the relationship of Grubovich’s parents and became the first batch of bankers in the Soviet Union to obtain a banking business license. A private enterprise, Menatep Bank even became the first private bank and the first listed company in the former Soviet Union since the "October Revolution".

In addition, Menatep became the first bank to open foreign currency exchange in Moscow in 1991, and opened a precedent for advertising on TV. Menatep not only provides financing for Khodorkovsky's own trading business, but also handles more state funds, such as the distribution of pensions for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, high inflation and skyrocketing interest rates allowed Menatep, who was good at lending and foreign exchange trading games, to grow rapidly. Of course, Khodorkovsky also made a fortune.

A man like Khodorkovsky never misses an opportunity that history offers.Russia’s privatization movement began in the 90s. In this largest state-owned asset privatization movement so far, Khodorkovsky, who “never thought of being a banker,” faced two choices at the time : Either be a banker for life, or become a financial expert in Russia's huge industrial field.He chose the latter.Khodorkovsky started his buying spree through Menatep.By 1995, Menatep had controlled more than 40 industrial companies (two years later, this number became more than 100), with tentacles involving real estate, steel, plastics, textiles, chemicals (including Apatit, which later got into trouble) and food, etc. field, with 1.5 employees and assets of US$21 billion.

Regarding these acquisitions, Khodorkovsky once said triumphantly: "In Russia, you can't be satisfied with making a lot of money in trade, because no one will understand it. You will not be at ease, you will be Extortion will be investigated and prosecuted by government agencies, and even your parents will no longer respect you. In the end, you will be strangled to death."

让多年前靠倒腾假PC起家的霍多尔科夫斯基财富迅速膨胀的是俄罗斯最大的资源——石油。1995年12月，以Menatep为首的财团以3.5亿美元的超低价格收购了尤科斯78%的股权。这个价格让很多人无法接受：实在是太便宜了——尤科斯当时的估值为7亿美元，1997年在莫斯科交易所上市时，市值则高达70亿美元。

"Someone made a deal between politics and money," local media said.This person, of course, refers to Khodorkovsky.

This transaction was just one of the "debt-to-equity swap" plans thrown out by Yeltsin at the time. Yeltsin reached an agreement with the giants involved in the plan: the government sold its shares in large steel and oil companies to oligarchs, and in When Yeltsin is running for re-election, the oligarch alliance, including Huo's, will give full support.The most famous seven oligarchs in Russian history were formally formed.

After the transaction was completed, Khodorkovsky became a powerful figure in Russia. However, Khodorkovsky at this stage was very different from other plutocrats. On the one hand, he did not deny that he had a good relationship with the government On the other hand, Khodorkovsky kept emphasizing to the Western media the importance of alignment between business and government: “We have to understand that the (Russian) government is still very important to business. Why is it so important? If the Prime Minister asks me to resign from Menatep, I will do so quickly." He even said to his staff: "I don't own anything, I rent it."

This low profile makes him very special among the seven oligarchs, and when he said these words, Berezovsky, who is considered to be the "Russian academician oligarch", was preaching everywhere that he and the other six oligarchs ( Khodorkovsky (the youngest of them all) controls nearly half of Russia's economy.

A political moderate, Khodorkovsky is considered a powerful man in business, where many say he is a dictatorial king. “He switched jobs a lot. Those groups that were assigned to work on projects would find that there was always another group working on the same project with them. This constant sense of crisis made employees feel that working at Yukos was like doing something. Extreme sports," said one of his employees.

Khodorkovsky tried to transform Yukos in the direction he imagined, and his series of actions made him look like a tyrant.

——After taking over Yukos, he installed closed-circuit television in the company and fired employees who performed poorly. It is said that he fired thousands of employees with alcohol habits in just a few months after taking over.Oil field workers in Yukos complained that they would be lucky if they could receive 12.5% of the monthly salary of US$10 that should have been paid three months ago.And this 10% salary is just to keep you from starving and keep working for him.

——In 1998, when oil prices fell in the international market, Yukos deliberately defaulted on the promised tax payment to the city of Nefteyugansk.Soon after, the mayor of the city was shot dead.As a result, the mayor's funeral turned into a demonstration against Yukos. Workers who were owed wages and about 4 fired workers stormed Yukos' offices in Siberia, smashing glass and computers.

——Since 1997, Khodorkovsky has adopted a variety of methods to consolidate his control over Yukos. For example, when a major shareholder meeting is about to be held and there is a very critical vote, shareholders will be informed of the meeting The location was suddenly changed to another distant city - it was impossible to catch up.

(End of this chapter)