Yury Kovalchuk


Yury Valentinovich Kovalchuk is a Russian billionaire businessman and financier who is "reputed to be Vladimir Putin's personal banker". The May 2008 issue of Russian Forbes listed him for the first time in its Golden Hundred of Russia's richest, calling him and another new entrant to the List, Gennady Timchenko, "good acquaintances of Vladimir Putin." The magazine placed him at number 53 on the Russians-only list, with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion. After sanctions imposed on Kovalchuk in 2018, this dropped to $650 million.
From 1987 to 1991 he was the first deputy director of Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute. Since 2004 he has been chair of Rossiya Bank and its largest shareholder.
Since the early 1990s Kovalchuk has owned a dacha in Solovyovka in the Priozersky District of the Leningrad region, located on the eastern shore of the Komsomolskoye lake on the Karelian Isthmus near St. Petersburg. His neighbours there are Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Yakunin, Andrei Fursenko, Sergey Fursenko, Viktor Myachin, Vladimir Smirnov and Nikolay Shamalov. Together they instituted the co-operative society Ozero which united their properties on 10 November 1996.
His elder brother Mikhail Kovalchuk is the scientific secretary of the Council for Science and High Technologies attached to the president of the Russian Federation.
In 2015 Yury Kovalchuk's National Media Group and US Discovery channel joined forces to form Media Alliance  of which NMG owns 80%. Later that year, Kovalchuk acquired the rights to Ted Turner’s Russian assets including the Russian version of CNN, Cartoon Network and Boomerang. The reason for the sale was based on the Russian media ownership law that limits ownership of Russian media by foreigners.
In 2017 Kovalchuk purchased the century-old Novy Svet vineyard in the Crimean Peninsula for $26.4 million in one of the first privatization deals in the region since the annexation of the region by Russia.

Sanctions

Kovalchuk was one of several individuals sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department on 20 March 2014 in response to the 2014 Crimean crisis. According to the U.S. Treasury, Kovalchuk is a close advisor to President Putin and has been referred to as one of his “cashiers.”
Kovalchuk is a known friend of Putin’ he hosted the wedding of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova to Kirill Shamalov at his wholly owned ski resort, Igora, in 2013.