Russian Tycoon Criticized Putin’s War. Retribution Was Swift.
by Anton Troianovski & Ivan Nechepurenko, May 1, 2022,, Ny Times

Oleg Y. Tinkov was worth more than $9 billion in November,
renowned as one of Russia’s few self-made business tycoons
after building his fortune outside the energy and minerals
industries that were the playgrounds of Russian kleptocracy.

Then, last month, Tinkov, the founder of one of Russia’s
biggest banks, criticized the war in Ukraine in a post on
Instagram. The next day, he said, Putin’s administration
contacted his executives and threatened to nationalize his
bank if it did not cut ties with him. Last week, he sold his
35% stake to a Russian mining billionaire in what he describes
as a “desperate sale, a fire sale” that was forced on him by
the Kremlin.

“I couldn’t discuss the price,” Tinkov said. “It was like a
hostage — you take what you are offered. I couldn’t negotiate.”

Tinkov, 54, spoke to The NY Times by phone on Sunday, from a
location he wouldn't disclose, in his first interview since
Putin invaded Ukraine. He said he had hired bodyguards after
friends with contacts in the Russian security services told
him he should fear for his life, and quipped that while he had
survived leukemia, perhaps “the Kremlin will kill me.”

It was a swift and jarring turn of fortune for a longtime
billionaire who for years had avoided running afoul of Putin
while portraying himself as independent of the Kremlin. His
downfall underscores the consequences facing those in the
Russian elite who dare to cross their president, and helps
explain why there has been little but silence from business
leaders who, according to Tinkov, are worried about the impact
of the war on their lifestyles and their wallets.

Indeed, Tinkov claimed that many of his acquaintances in the
business and government elite told him privately that they
agreed with him, “but they are all afraid.”
In the interview, Tinkov spoke out more forcefully against the
war than has any other major Russian business leader.

“I’ve realized that Russia, as a country, no longer exists,”
Tinkov said, predicting that Putin would stay in power a long
time. “I believed that the Putin regime was bad. But of course,
I had no idea that it would take on such catastrophic scale.”
The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.

Tinkoff, the bank Tinkov started in 2006, denied his characteri-
zation of events and said there had been “no threats of any kind
against the bank’s leadership.” The bank, which announced last
Thursday that Tinkov had sold his entire stake in the company to
a firm run by Vladimir Potanin, a mining magnate close to Putin,
appeared to be distancing itself from its founder.

“Oleg has not been in Moscow for many years, did not participate
in the life of the company and was not involved in any matters,”
Tinkoff said in a statement.

Tinkov has also run into trouble in the West. He agreed to pay
$507 million last year to settle a tax fraud case in the United
States. In March, Britain included him on a list of sanctions
against the Russian business elite.

“These oligarchs, businesses and hired thugs are complicit in the
murder of innocent civilians and it is right that they pay the
price,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said at the time.

Tinkov is nevertheless widely seen as a rare Russian business
pioneer, modeling his maverick capitalism on Richard Branson and
morphing from irreverent beer brewer to founder of one of the
world’s most sophisticated online banks. He says he has never
set foot in the Kremlin, and he has occasionally criticized Putin.

But unlike Russian tycoons who years ago broke with Putin and
now live in exile, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail B.
Khodorkovsky or the tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov, Tinkov found
a way to coexist with the Kremlin and make billions — at least
until April 19.

That is when Tinkov published an emotional antiwar post on
Instagram, calling the invasion “crazy” and deriding Russia’s
military: “Why would we have a good army,” he asked, if everything
else in the country is dysfunctional “and mired in nepotism,
servility and subservience?”

Pro-war Russians posted photos of their shredded Tinkoff debit
cards on social media. Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent state TV
host, delivered a tirade against him, declaring, “Your conscience
is rotten.”

Tinkov was already outside Russia at that point, having departed
in 2019 to receive treatment for leukemia. He later stepped down
and ceded control of Tinkoff, but kept a 35% stake in the company,
which was valued at more than $20 billion on the London stock
exchange last year.

A day after the April 19 post, Tinkov said Sunday, the Kremlin
contacted the bank’s senior executives and told them that any
association with their founder was now a major problem.

“They said: ‘The statement of your shareholder is not welcomed,
and we will nationalize your bank if he doesn’t sell it and the
owner doesn’t change, and if you don’t change the name,’” Tinkov
said, citing sources at Tinkoff he declined to identify.

On April 22, Tinkoff announced it would change its name this
year, a step it claims was long planned. Behind the scenes, Tinkov
says, he was scrambling to sell his stake — one that had already
been devalued by Western sanctions against Russia’s financial system.

Tinkov said he was thankful to Potanin, the mining magnate, for
allowing him to salvage at least some money from his company; he
said that he could not disclose a price, but that he had sold at
3% of what he believed to be his stake’s true value.

“They made me sell it because of my pronouncements,” Tinkov said.
“I sold it for kopecks.”

He had been considering selling his stake anyway, Tinkov said,
because “as long as Putin is alive, I doubt anything will change.”

“I don’t believe in Russia’s future,” he said. “Most importantly,
I am not prepared to associate my brand and my name with a country
that attacks its neighbors without any reason at all.”

Tinkov is concerned that a foundation he started that is dedicated
to improving blood cancer treatment in Russia could also become a
casualty of his financial trouble.

He denied that he was speaking out in the hopes of getting the
U.K. sanctions against him lifted, though he said he hoped the
British government would eventually “correct this mistake.”

He said that his illness — he is now suffering from graft-versus-
host disease, a stem-cell transplant complication, he said —
might have made him more courageous about speaking out than
other Russian business leaders and senior officials. Members of
the elite, he claimed, are “in shock” about the war and have
called him in great numbers to offer support.

“They understand that they are tied to the West, that they are
part of the global market, and so on,” Tinkov said. “They’re
fast, fast being turned into Iran. But they don’t like it. They
want their kids to spend their summer holidays in Sardinia.”

Tinkov said that no one from the Kremlin had ever contacted him
directly, but that in addition to the pressure on his company,
he heard from friends with security service contacts that he
could be in physical danger.

“They told me: ‘The decision regarding you has been made,’” he
said. “Whether that means that on top of everything they’re
going to kill me, I don’t know. I don’t rule it out.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/world/europe/oligarch-putin-oleg-tinkov.html

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