Gennady Nikolayevich Timchenko (Russian: Геннадий Николаевич Тимченко, also spelled Guennadi Timtchenko; born 9 November 1952) is a Russian oligarch and billionaire businessman. He founded and owns the private investment firm Volga Group. He was previously a co-owner of Gunvor Group.
Timchenko has been close friends with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since the early 1990s. In 1991, Putin gave Timchenko an oil export license. Timchenko then founded Gunvor, which has now exported billions of dollars-worth of Russian oil.
Timchenko’s investment firm Volga Group owns a large stake of shares of the natural gas giant Novatek. The Pandora Papers leaks revealed that a Timchenko firm, which played a key role in the Novatek investment, obtained massive loans through anonymous offshore shell companies. Timchenko was sanctioned by the US over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. He was about to be sanctioned further by the government of the United Kingdom just before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
As of March 2022, Timchenko was 205th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated fortune of US $10.3 billion; he is the sixth richest person in Russia. He is known for being the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Kontinental Hockey League, and President of the SKA Saint Petersburg ice hockey club. He is a citizen of Russia, Finland, and Armenia
Timchenko’s biggest holding is a 23.5% stake in Novatek, a publicly traded natural gas producer. He holds the shares through Volga Group and ENA Invest, his Russia-based investment vehicles, according to Interfax’s SPARK database. Novatek is responsible for about 10% of Russia’s natural gas production, according to its website.
Other holdings include a 14.5% stake in petrochemical company Sibur, 80% of rail company Transoil and 52% in Russian construction company Stroytransgaz, according to public filings and media reports.
The billionaire sold a 44% stake in Gunvor Group, a Cyprus-based oil trader, to partner Torbjorn Tornqvist in March 2014, ahead of US economic sanctions. Details of the transaction aren’t disclosed and this analysis calculates that he received $2 billion from the sale.
Timchenko and his billionaire partner Leonid Mikhelson acquired Sibur from Gazprombank, the lending affiliate of state-controlled energy company Gazprom, in 2010 and 2011. The investment cost used here was calculated based on the value stated by Gazprombank in December 2010, when it sold the first 25% for $1.3 billion.
His smaller holdings include about 10% of Bank Rossia and 30% of coal mining company Kolmar, according to Volga’s representative.
Risk discounts are applied to account for the effects of western sanctions when most of the peer companies used to value his holdings trade outside of Russia.
Timchenko was sanctioned by the US in 2014 after Crimea annexation and by the UK and European Union in 2022 over the escalating conflict in Ukraine.
Biography
Education: Leningradsky Mechanical University
Gennady Timchenko was born in Armenia in 1952, the son of a Soviet military officer. He grew up in Ukraine and East Germany, and attended Leningrad Mechanical University, where he earned an electrical engineering degree. In 1976, Timchenko began working at Izhorsk Plants, a Soviet builder of nuclear power reactors in St. Petersburg and after eight years, he joined the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade. He became deputy head of Kirishineftekhimexport, a state exporter of oil products to the West in 1988, at the age of 36.
Timchenko joined Urals Finland, a European importer of Russian oil and petrol products in 1991. Meanwhile, as the Soviet Union was falling apart in the early 1990s, he met and befriended Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin was also the chairman of a judo club Timchenko co-founded.
Timchenko started his own oil trading company, Gunvor, in 2000 with a Swedish partner, Torbjorn Tornqvist. By 2007, the first year it disclosed its financial details, Gunvor reported $43 billion in revenue. The billionaire formed Volga Resources, a Luxembourg-based investment company, which he used to purchase 5% of Russian gas producer Novatek for $460 million. Volga acquired an additional 13% of the gas producer in 2009, and Timchenko joined the company’s board. He sold his stake in Gunvor to Tornqvist on March 19, 2014, for an undisclosed amount ahead of US economic sanctions.
The mogul has since expanded his investments into other industries acquiring stakes in construction company Stroytransgaz and petrochemical maker Sibur.
Milestones
- 1952 Born in Armenia, then part of the Soviet Union.
- 1976 Begins working for a state-run construction plant in Leningrad.
- 1982 Starts working at Russian foreign trade ministry in Leningrad.
- 1988 Named deputy general director of oil company, Kirishineftekhimexport.
- 1997 Founds oil-trading company Gunvor.
- 2007 Gunvor reports $43 billon in revenue in first financial disclosure.
- 2011 Acquires 38 percent of petrochemical company, Sibur.
- 2014 Sells Gunvor stake to Tornqvist for undisclosed sum.
- 2014 U.S. authorities start money-laundering probe of Timchenko
