2. Vladimir Potanin
Potanin is credited with devising the infamous “loans for shares” scam, which allowed politically connected Russians to obtain control of state-owned businesses during the country’s privatization in the 1990s. The majority of his fortune is currently invested in Nornickel, a palladium and nickel company listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange.
“The mastermind behind [Russia’s] so-called loans-for-shares scheme,” according to his Bloomberg profile, where people and organizations lent money to the country in exchange for holdings in its natural resource companies. Networth $27Billion
