PHOTO: Forbes report-Russian Billionaires in and out of Russia,with ties with Putin, last year, added over $104 Billion in earnings

Russian billionaires are worth $104 billion more than they were last year, thanks to the recovery of commodity markets and an increase in the value of Russian currency.

Many oligarchs  got a boost on the heels of Donald Trump’s election as well. 

In total Russia’s 96 billionaires, including several connected to Vladimir Putin and at least one tied to Trump, are now worth a combined $386 billion, according to Forbes’ 2017 World’s Billionaires List.

“The cronies and commodity people have done well,” said Anders Aslund, who served as an economic advisor to the Russian government in the early 1990s and now works at the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council. 

“The commodity prices went up a bit in the last year, and therefore the fortunes are up.”

There are 19 more billionaires counted in this year’s total, including three newcomers to the list and 16 businessmen who had fallen off of it in recent years but returned in 2017. Only nine of Russia’s 96 billionaires lost money over the last year.

Three of the big gainers are alleged members of Putin’s inner circle. Gennady Timchenko, who owns an estimated 23% stake in natural gas producer Novatek, was listed at $16 billion this year, $4.6 billion more than he was in 2016. 

Shares of Novatek jumped 27% from February of 2016 to February of 2017, when Forbes locked in calculations for its billionaires lists the last two years.

In 2014 the U.S. Department of the Treasury levelled sanctions  against Timchenko, and alleged that Putin had invested in an oil trading firm he had cofounded. The Russian billionaire sold  his 43% stake in the firm, Gunvor, one day before the U.S. Treasury Department issued its sanctions.

Construction titan Arkady Rotenberg, a onetime judo sparring partner of Putin who was also sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014, more than doubled his personal fortune from $1 billion to $2.6 billion over the last year. Despite the sanctions, revenues at his construction firm SGM Group surged more than 20% in 2015.

The same year, the Russian Ministry of Transport granted SGM Group an exclusive contract to build a reported $3.7 billion bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized in a 2014 armed takeover. Construction of the bridge is scheduled to be completed in 2018,.

Revenues at another Rotenberg company, fertilizer giant Minudobreniya, surged an estimated 52% in 2016.

The man alleged to be Putin’s personal banker, Yuri Kovalchuk, returned to the billionaires list this year for the first time since 2014.

According to reports published in the Panama Papers leak last year, Kovalchuk’s Bank Rossiya may have helped Putin move millions of dollars in cash offshore, though both men deny it.

 The U.S. government sanctioned both Kovalchuk and his company, Bank Rossiya, in 2014 and called Kovalchuk one of Putin’s personal “cashiers.”

“The Kremlin certainly made it an issue that those who were on the sanctions list would not suffer because of it,” 

said Professor Timothy Frye, who studies Russian politics and economics at Columbia University, later adding, “Timchenko, Rotenberg and Kovalchuk, those are longtime associates of President Putin.”

Russian billionaires also benefited from the increasing strength of the Russian ruble, which jumped 35% against the dollar in the last year, thanks to improving commodity prices and hopes of better relations with the West.

Several Russian oligarchs who don’t have as close ties to the Kremlin also added billions. Oil tycoon Vagit Alekperov, a former Soviet deputy minister, gained $5.6 billion after shares of his firm Lukoil spiked 42%, thanks to the rising price of crude.

Steel titan Alexey Mordashov added $6.6 billion as the price of industrial metals climbed amid stabilizing demand for materials in China, as well as hopes that a Trump presidency might mean more infrastructure spending in America.

The biggest gainer of all was fellow steel magnate Vladimir Lisin, whose fortune jumped from $9.3 billion to $16.1 billion. Lisin gained roughly $830 million in the three days after Trump’s victory alone.

Aluminum titan Oleg Deripaska more than doubled his fortune from $2.1 billion to $5.1 billion over the last year, as aluminum prices recovered following roughly two years of declines. Deripaska landed in the international spotlight last week, when the 

A news reported that he had once worked with Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who presented Deripaska with a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin government.”

Real estate tycoon Aras Agalarov—who along with his son Emin, had hopes to build a Trump Tower in Russia before Trump ran for president—was listed at $1.7 billion this year, up $500 million from last year. Forbes uncovered new information about his fortune over the last 12 months, proving that he is worth more than previously believed.

source:Forbes.com