Since the beginning of the year, Vladimir Lisin, chairman of the board of directors of NLMK and several times ranked as Russia’s richest man, has earned $1.17bn, raising his net worth to $21bn. In second place is his peer, Leonid Mikhelson, who owns Russia’s LNG champion Novatek and who also has made $1.65bn in eight weeks, and his fortune now stands at $26.3bn, according to the index, thanks to the valuation appreciation of his stocks. The founder and majority owner of Russia’s biggest privately owned oil company Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov, has earned the most, after he added $3.17bn in just the last two months, bringing his fortune up to $18.5bn, according to Bloomberg’s calculations. One of the factors that has reignited the interest of investors is that many of Russia’s blue chip companies feel comfortable enough to restart paying dividends for several years Russia’s leading corporations have been paying the most generous dividends in the world, typically at least twice the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets average. However, Russian domestic investors are still actively buying and selling stocks and the market is open to investors from “friendly” countries, some of whom have been bottom fishing in the last year.Īs bne IntelliNews has reported, after the initial shocks of sanctions passed, Russia’s economy has started to stabilise again and that has put money back into the pockets of the oligarchs. However, since the appearance of sanctions, Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT international money transfer system and the strict capital controls imposed by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), the market has been locked up and investors who were holding Russian shares on February 24 last year now have billions of dollars trapped in the Russian market they are unlikely ever to see again. Likewise, the ruble-denominated MOEX Russia Index reached an all-time high of 4,292.68 in October of 2021, before following the RTS down into the abyss.įoreign portfolio investors used to make up half of the investment volume in Russia’s stock market, which has typically been either amongst the best performing markets in the world each year, or the worst – depending on whether Russia was going through one of its regular crises or not. The RTS hit a two-decade-long peak of 1,934 on October 26, a week before the US State Department gave a press conference warning that Russia could invade Ukraine “any day now” that sent the stock market into a tailspin. In 2021 alone there were a dozen Russian IPOs that raised billions of dollars, and another 24 companies were in the IPO pipeline for 2022. ( chart)īut the market began to boom again from about 2000 onwards as a four-year recession came to an end and foreign investors enthusiastically piled back into the Russian equity market. The dollar-denominated RTS Russia index broke through the psychologically important 1,000 mark last week – a level it traded at for years following the first round of sanctions imposed in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea.
The index uses the value of their company shares and other metrics to calculate the wealth of Russia’s top businessmen, and despite the extreme sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine just over a year ago, the Russian stock market has shown some signs of life recently. Hundreds of Russian oligarchs have been hit with sanctions and their yachts and luxury homes abroad seized by the authorities, but rather than crushing their businesses, the oligarchs added a collective $13.7bn to their wealth in the first three months of this year, according to the Bloomberg billionaire index published on April 3.
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