Ukraine's richest man owns System Capital Management, the country's largest industrial conglomerate. The Mariupol-based company has investments in metallurgy, mining and energy. It owns power company DTEK and controls a 71.2% stake in closely held Metinvest, the country's largest steel manufacturer.
Rinat Akhmetov's net worth of $5.61B can buy ...
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The majority of Akhmetov's wealth is derived from System Capital Management (SCM), the largest diversified business group in Ukraine. Akhmetov is the ultimate beneficial owner of SCM, according to its website.
The company's most valuable assets are Metinvest, Ukraine's largest steel company, and DTEK, a coal and energy business. A 20% discount is applied to all assets to reflect liquidity risk in Ukraine.
Metinvest is valued using its financial results for 12 months to Dec. 31, 2020 and the average enterprise value-to-Ebitda, enterprise value-to-sales and price-to-sales multiples of four peers: Evraz, Novolipetsk Steel, Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Work and Severstal.
DTEK is valued using its 2020 results and the average price-to-earnings and price-to-sales multiples of three publicly traded energy peer companies: Tauron Polska Energia, Enea and CEZ AS.
Other SCM assets include Ukrtelecom, a telecommunications company, as well as agricultural land through HarvEast and Ukrainian commercial real estate through ESTA Group. Akhmetov also controls Lemtrans, a private railway company. Other investments include Vega Telecom and First Ukrainian International Bank.
Akhmetov owns 100% of each company included in this analysis, according to the SCM website, unless otherwise stated in the asset note for each.
Rinat Akhmetov was born in 1966 in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, an industrial, Russian-speaking section of the country. Akhmetov started his own business trading coal in 1990, and in the next decades consolidated ownership of the country's most important steel and coal mining companies. He established Dongorbank in 1995.
Akhmetov, whose father and older brother were coal miners, had gotten his start in business with Akhat Bragin, who was once accused by a local police chief in Donetsk of having connections to organized crime. Bragin, who denied the claim, was killed along with five others in an explosion at the Shakhtar Donetsk soccer club's stadium during a match in October 1995. He was the club's president at the time. Akhmetov, who was a vice president of the club, replaced Bragin, and is still in the role.
The billionaire has fully cooperated with all police investigations, has never been charged with any crime, and has never been implicated in any manner in the Bragin murder by the police or prosecutors, according to a March 2, 2006 statement from Akhmetov's attorneys from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.
He founded System Capital Management Group in 2000, of which he remains the sole owner today. Akhmetov joined Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of then President Leonid Kuchma, to buy Ukraine's largest steel mill Kryvorizhstal in a 2004 state asset sale. The Kryvorizhstal sale was challenged in 2005 by the government after the so-called Orange Revolution. Popular protests swept Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency, defeating Kuchma's prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych.
Nevertheless, Yanukovych was elected as Ukraine's President in 2010 and Akhmetov supported Yanukovych’s party. As the sole bidder in two of five government auctions since 2011, Akhmetov’s DTEK paid about $600 million to acquire state stakes in some of the country’s leading power generators that gave him control of about 70 percent of Ukraine’s power output.
Yanukovych was ousted and fled Ukraine in early 2014 after mass protests. It led to uprising of pro-Russian rebels in Lugansk and Donetsk regions of the country, where many of Akhmetov's enterprises are located, forcing the billionaire to move from his native Donetsk to Kiev.