The Russian businessman Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich was born on 24 October 1966 in Saratov, Russia and was an orphan at the age of two, being raised by one of his uncles from Ukhta.
He studied at the Moscow Auto Transport Institute and began the oil business in the Omsk region, becoming successful very fast and joining the board of the Sibneft company. After a while he took control of the whole project and with a merger the company became the fourth largest oil company in the world. Sibneft was sold to Gazprom in 2005.
The business began for Roman Abramovich when he was in army service and this is also when he married his first wife Olga. The billionaire began working as a street-trader then becoming a mechanic at a local factory and then sold rubber ducks created in his apartment in Moscow. He was studying at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, selling them retreaded car tires to support himself and he started trading commodities for the Runicom trading company of Switzerland.
By 1988 Russia was going through perestroika and this allowed Roman to make his business official, creating a doll company. He invested in oil conglomerates and pig farms in the period, creating and liquidating over twenty companies in the early 1990s in a large array of fields. Five of his companies were created between 1992 and 1995 and they began to specialize in the trading of oil and oil products. He was arrested in 1992 for theft of government property but the co-operation with the investigation led to the case being closed.
In 1992 he created Mekong and started selling oil from Noyabrsk, meeting Boris Berezovsky at a meeting of Russian businessmen in the Caribvean in 1993 and thus beginning to have ties with the circle of Boris Yeltsin. The relation between Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky who was an associate of the President Boris Yeltsin was what ensured the prosperity of the former, helping him to gain interest in the Sibneft oil company in 1995. The original company was created through presidential decree and its estimated production of oil is around 3 billion us dollars in worth per year.
The idea was a part of the loans-for-shares program where each partner paid $100 million for half of the company below the actual stake of the stock market, thus becoming billionaires overnight. After seeing the rapid increase in value, the observers noted that it was probably estimated at a much lower sum than it was actually worth and Abramovich admitted at a later date that he paid bribes to government officials amounting to billions to obtain protection from gangsters and to have permission to acquire such assets or other aluminum ones during the aluminum wars.
The toy manufacturer continued as the director of the ABK small enterprise in Moscow until 1993 and later on began various companies, as stated above and by 1996, at the age of 30, he was not only rich but also close to the president, moving into an apartment in the Kremlin at the invitation of the Yeltsin family.
Three years later he was an established businessman and was elected governor of the Chukotka region of Russia which is in the extreme eastern side of the country. Here he spent large sums of money to rebuild the region and this led to a second term in 2005. The overall sum spent from his own pocket in the region is estimated at 1.3 billion dollars and it is now one of the areas with the highest birth rate in Russia, having vastly improved living standards. This led to him being awarded the Order of Honour for his contributions to the development of the district by the President of Russia.
Apparently the first person to recommend Vladimir Putin to Yeltsin as a successor was Roman Abramovich after interviewing all the cabinets for Prime Minster positions in 1999 and he remained one of the closest confidants to Putin in the years to come. When Putin sought a successor in 2007 Abramovich was the one to recommend Medvedev. With so much presence and influence he was referred to as “Mr A” in the Kremlin.
The Times wrote extensively about Roman Abramovich and said that he “emerged triumphant after the ‘aluminum wars’, in which more than 100 people are believed to have been killed in gangland feuds over control of the lucrative smelters.” When he was interviewed by the newspaper he admitted to paying billions of dollars for political favors and protection fees.
In his personal life he married Olga Yurevna Lysova in 1987 and in 1990 they divorced. A year later he married Irina Vyacheslavovna Malandina, a former Russian Aeroflot stewardess and they divorced in 2007 after having five children: Ilya, Arina, Sofia, Arkadiy and Anna. Roman had a relationship with the daughter of Alexander Radkin Zhukov, a Russian oligarch and they had two children together, Aaron Alexander and Leah Lou.
Throughout the globe he is now most famous for his involvement with European football, becoming the owner of the Chelsea Football Club in west London from June 2003. This led to an immediate expansion of the team with a lot more commercial developments and the plans to build a highly modern training complex in Cobham, Surrey.
In the 2004-05 season Chelsea were league champions for the first time in 50 years and the second time in their entire history, winning eleven important trophies since Abramovich took over and making the team the most successful team in England. Chelsea is the first English team to win all European trophies and the way in which transfers were made went through significant changes due to the extensive wealth of Roman who could purchase players as he wanted, making a record transfer fee at the time with Andriy Shevchenko for 30 million pounds.
After the success of 2005 Chelsea went through losses and the next year Jose Mourinho left the management of the club, making way to Luiz Felipe Scolari who was there for less than a year. Guus Hiddink replaced him and he helped take the first trophy in the shape of the FA Cup after which he was replaced with Carlo Ancelotti. The acquisition of Fernando Torres in January 2011 set a new record for British transfers for the estimated sum of 50 billion dollars and on 22 June 2011 Andre Villas-Boas was appointed as manager but only for half a year since only one game in eleven games was won in the period.
Roberto Di Matteo came next after he won the UEFA Champions League and the FA Cup but after Chelsea lost 3-0 against Juventus he was sacked as well and Rafael Benitez took his place winning the Europe League for the team against Benfica. After the 2012-13 season was over he left the team and Jose Mourinho returned with a four-year contract.
He is very interested in art, sponsoring exhibitions in various countries and owning an impressive art collection. Yachts are also one of his passions and he is the greatest spender on luxury yachts in the world, owning what is called “Abramovich’s Navy”: the 162 meter Eclipse, the 78 meter Titan, Sussurro and several other ships that he sold in the meantime.
