Vladimir Potanin is best known as the mastermind behind the controversial loan-for-share program.
A month earlier, Vladimir Potanin sat with the world’s financial and business elite among the advisory board of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
Those power circles, which included former Blackstone Inc. executive Tom Hill and billionaires from Brazil and India, had been cultivated for decades. Now, they have gone to Russia’s richest man, Potanin. In the past two weeks, he has been off both boards.
Nickel and palladium magnets, which are among the few original oligarchs active in trade in Russia, are not approved. With a net worth of $24.5 billion, Potanin is best known as the mastermind behind the controversial loan-for-share program that led to the privatization of natural resource companies following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Over the past two decades, American cultural institutions in the arts, non-profits and academia were drawn to the history of how billionaires pooled their fortunes with Russia. In Potanin’s case, he was publicly seen with Vladimir Putin years earlier, including at an exhibition hockey game with the Russian leader in Sochi.
Potanin, 61, now serves as an example of how fast Western bastions of social capital are changing amid a pressure campaign on Putin to end the Ukraine war. While Russia’s elite have many ways to reshape their fortunes in response to the fallout, regaining their place in these institutions will prove a daunting task.
“The reputational risk of placing an oligarch on an institutional board like the CFR is just too great,” said David Szaconi, co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, which researches the philanthropy of billionaires whose fortunes are tied. Russia. “It is going to be very difficult for Potanin to win back his former positions.”
Potanin, president of MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, which accounts for about 40% of global palladium production and 10% of refined nickel, did not respond to interview requests.
The former First Deputy Prime Minister of Energy and Economy under Boris Yeltsin spoke publicly last week for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, criticizing Russia’s retaliation against international punishment.
“We must appear respectable and composed, and our efforts should be directed not at ‘slamming the door’, but at maintaining Russia’s economic position in the markets,” Potanin said on Norilsk Nickel’s Telegram channel in March. 1 1
Potanin, along with oligarchs Petr Aven and Mikhail Friedman, are among billionaires with links to Russia, who have given more than $300 million to hundreds of the most prestigious US nonprofits over the two decades ending in 2020, anti-corruption. Data Collective. At least $100 million went to more than 100 organizations in New York, according to data provided to Bloomberg shows.
In the Guggenheim, Solomon R. The board of trustees was required to donate at least $100,000 per year, according to Thomas Cranes, director emeritus of the Guggenheim Foundation, who said he had more than a decade of contact with Potanin. He remembered the Russian billionaire as constantly supporting exhibitions of Russian art and being “quiet, not outspoken” at meetings.
“Many oligarchs saw an opportunity and went to it” to cement their reputation with philanthropy in the West, Cranes said in a telephone interview. “The response to this war and Putin’s strategy is trying to divert or shine a spotlight on money and where it came from.”
less restrictions
Many New York donors are not approved. It doesn’t stop queries.
New York-based DigitalOcean Holdings Inc. CEO of Yancey Spruill was asked at a conference last week about Len Blavatnik, a British-American billionaire whose Access Industries is the technology company’s biggest investor.
“Educated at American universities, Columbia, Harvard Business School, made his money as an American,” Sprouil said in response on March 8. “I know there’s a lot of speculation,” he said, adding that Blavatnik is knighted by a “knight.” Queen of England.”
Blavatnik was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew in his fortune in the Putin era when Russia’s state-owned Rosneft bought his energy firm. At $36.9 billion, his net worth exceeds that of Potanin, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Access Industries said in a statement, “What is happening in Ukraine is unimaginable and we, along with all fellow Americans, hope and pray that the conflict ends soon and all Ukrainian citizens can once again live their lives in peace and freedom.” be able to live.” ,
Blavatnik has donated across the political and philanthropic spectrum, including the Central Park Conservancy, Carnegie Hall, Mount Sinai Health System and New York Governor Cathy Hochul.
hard tracking
Szacconi said it is difficult to track the full extent of charitable donations because institutions often do not disclose their donors out of concern that they will receive backlash on the politics of beneficiaries. Specific donations may be disclosed in a wider range or even as a bare minimum amount, and in some cases no value may be disclosed, he said.
And even though some institutions are asking billionaire donors to step down from their boards, they are not refunding the money or shutting down the show. For example, the Guggenheim still has an ongoing exhibition by Moscow-born artist Wassily Kandinsky that was sponsored by benefactors including Potanin – although his name has since been removed from the museum’s website.
Moscow-born artist Wassily Kandinsky in New York City
The demonstration was a reminder of the complexity in curtailing philanthropic support from billionaires who were welcomed in the heyday of a global goldsmith.
Stanisaw Marcus said, “It is more difficult to uncover the charity of the liberal oligarchs of decades, which, after all, has served to advance the public interest in the West, than to seize the dominant symbols of oligarchic wealth, leading many to are angry.” Business professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied Russian money.
A CFR spokesman said in an email last week that it “would not be appropriate” for Potanin to remain a member of its global advisory board “in light of Russia’s continued aggression against Ukraine”. The Guggenheim Museum said he had resigned from the board.
Potanin has wide-ranging interests that include a Russian pharmaceutical firm, a ski resort, a copper project and at least two superyachts.
After building up his fortune, Potanin began to reinvent himself as a philanthropist – becoming the first Russian to attend Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge in 2013. He chairs the Hermitage Development Foundation, an endowment for the State Museum in St. Petersburg that was established in 1764. With a collection of paintings acquired by Catherine the Great.
On his foundation’s website, Potanin said he wanted philanthropy to be “more systematic, more business-like”, calling it “a vast, endless space that will never shrink”.
—With assistance from Amanda L. Gordon and Devon Pendleton.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)