AVEN
Petr
Businessman
Date of Birth: 16 March 1955
Age: 69 years old
Place of Birth: Moscow, Russia
Zodiac sign: Pisces
Profession: Businessman
Biography
Early life
Petr Aven, or Pyotr Aven, was born on March 16, 1955, in a Soviet Moscow housing block to computer science professor Oleg. He is Jewish through his mother, while his paternal grandfather Janis Aven (Jānis Avens) served in the Latvian army as a rifleman.
He completed his studies in 1977 at Moscow State University, a world-famous university that is regularly named among the top 100 globally. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Economics, and continued his studies in the field for three more years, earning the status of Candidate of Economic Sciences in 1980.
Scientific and research roles
One of Aven’s first positions following graduation was a senior research role at the Institute for Systems Analysis of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, where he would rise through the ranks from junior to senior research fellow between 1981 and 1988. This was also his first point of contact with fellow economist Yegor Gaidar, who would become the Acting Prime Minister of Russia in just a few years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The year after he departed the Institute for Systems Analysis, Petr Aven was given an advisory role at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which contracted him out for two years as a research fellow to Laxenburg, Austria, home of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Entry into government
Aven’s former colleague Gaidar appointed him First Deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Relations in 1991, and he continued to serve under Boris Yeltsin the following year, as Russian Minister of Economic Relations. He also earned himself a role in international relations, serving as the presidential advisor for relations with Group of Seven (G7) nations. The G7 was established in 1973 by the major industrialized nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
This was a time of crisis for Russia, and Aven undertook the project to develop a new rouble exchange program to solve the country’s foreign debt problems, which involved numerous foreign trade and economic missions to western capitals at the highest level. He ended up playing a key role in improving convertibility between the rouble and other currencies, while opening up foreign trade in the Russian Federation’s first few years of existence. He would ultimately step down from his role following the resignation of Gaidar from government in December 1992.
New beginnings after politics
Aven leapt at the opportunity to move into business in the aftermath of his political career, advising Boris Berezovsky the very same month that he left government. Berezovsky, who would eventually make the Forbes list with a net worth of $3 billion, ran the country’s first private car dealership. He made Aven advisor to the Corporate President, a position which he would hold until the following February.
By March, he had founded the Pyotr Aven Finances (FinPA) consulting company, using his knowledge from government in leveraging external debt to support business deals. He would regularly seek consultation with Russia’s first private bank, Alfa-Bank, which marked the beginning of a fruitful and long-standing working relationship between Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman.
Alfa-Bank
A 1994 bilateral asset swap landed Aven 10% of Alfa’s shares in exchange for a significant 50% stake in FinPA. This marked a growing professional and commercial interest in the bank, which would be further entrenched the same year, when Aven was named President and Member of the Board of Directors of Alfa-Bank Russia.
Fridman had founded the company four years earlier, in the last days of the Soviet Union. Once the company had been awarded a bank operating license, it was able to welcome its first commercial clients.
Aven would play a high-profile role at Russia’s foremost private bank over the next 18 years, being appointed Chairman in 2011. He served as the company’s figurehead for 11 years before finally stepping down in 2022. His time at Alfa-Bank gave him the opportunity to bolster his net worth, which is currently estimated at around $4.8 billion.
He was a key player in terms of the bank’s overall strategy and made sure that Alfa-Bank enjoyed good working relationships with business and government nationally and overseas. The finances speak for themselves: $8.67 billion in total equity, $61.85 worth of assets, and a $1.35 billion net income as of 2020. There are more than 26,000 people employed at the bank, which has north of 1 million retail customers and over 22 million corporate clients.
Alfa-Bank made an announcement on March 1, 2022 on the imminent departure from the board of directors of Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman, Sergey Matsotsky and Alexander Galitsky. Aven and Fridman still hold 12.4% and 32% of the shares in ABH Holdings, which means that they do not pass the 50% limit that would expose the banking group to sanctions.
Recent ventures
An announcement was made on August 9, 2022 that the Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven had handed over their interests in British fintech startup ANNA Money to its co-founders Boris Dyakonov and Eduard Panteleev.
Other roles
Petr Aven has held numerous positions in the private sector. In 1998, he was named Member of the Board of Directors by the Aviakor aviation company, and Chairman of the Board of Directors at CTC Media as well as Alfa-TV, a subsidiary of Alfa-Bank.
He was made head of the Russian–Latvian Business Council in 2007. His role on the council facilitated the strengthening of bilateral relations between the two countries. In particular, the third meeting of the Russian–Latvian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic, Scientific, Technological, Humanitarian and Cultural Cooperation offered a platform for the tabling of numerous motions on issues such as technical support for aviation equipment repairs, double taxation, and telecommunication cooperation between Lattelecom from Latvia and Russia’s Sinterra.
The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the National Organization for Financial Reporting Standards and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) all count Aven as a member.
In the cultural sphere, he is a trustee of the UK’s New Economic School and Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In Russia, meanwhile, he is on both the Board of Trustees of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Russian Football Union (RFU) Executive Committee. He is also a trustee of the Russian Olympians Foundation and a member of Yale University’s President’s Council on International Activities.
Net worth
With a net worth of $4.8 billion, Petr Aven’s was at one point named the 28th richest Russian billionaire. In early 2023, Forbes put him as the 575th wealthiest person globally.
As of June 2020, he held a stake worth 7.02% in the Altimo telecom company, and 13.8% of the Alfa holding company ABH Holdings. The latter share, which also includes oil and gas interests, had fallen slightly to 12.4% by 2022.
He bought the former residence of the Guinness family in Sardinia, Italy in 2006, and currently resides in the Ingliston House mansion in Virginia Water, a village in the English county of Surrey.
He is a noted art collector, and his works have been valued at a total of $500 million.
Books and lectures
Aven has authored many scientific papers and other publications covering various issues in trade and economic development, and is a professor at Moscow’s highly regarded HSE University. He is a regular lecturer in Russia and abroad, having made speaking appearances at the University of Glasgow, UK, Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Yale University, USA.
His book, Gaidar’s Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation of Russia, covers his early professional milestones in the first years of the Russian Federation. In it, Aven examines Gaidar’s economic reforms and institution of market economics during a period of national turbulence. He is also the author of The Time of Berezovsky, which draws from a series of interviews with the businessman’s many high-profile associates from throughout his career.
Awards and honors
Aven has received numerous awards and honors of various kinds throughout his career, including the Order of Honour, which was established in 1994 by the new Russian Federation to continue the legacy of the Soviet Order of the Badge of Honour, recognizing the contributions of politicians, economists, scientists, cultural figures, athletes and philanthropists to public life.
The University of Latvia gave him an honorary doctorate "for scientific and practical contributions to Latvia's development and cooperation with Russia” in 2013. His input into Russian–American relations during both his political and business careers was recognized in 2015, when he was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. During the awards ceremony, which was held during the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Awards Dinner, special mention was made of his role in the creation of the Alfa Fellowship Program.
Painting collection
His growing collection of early 20th century painting from Russia is of particular note, and includes a portrait of the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov made by abstract painter Mikhail Larionov in 1910. Other painters whose masterpieces feature in the collection include Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Boris Kustodiev, Konstantin Korovin, Aristarkh Lentulov and Robert Falk. Aven has exhibited works from his collection at the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tretyakov Gallery and Jewish Museum in Moscow.
It was made public in early 2021 that Aven had purchased a prime building on Krišjāņa Valdemāra iela, a street in central Riga where the collection would be housed. He put the decision down to his family heritage in Latvia, commenting that he hoped the museum he was preparing to open in the country’s capital would “make a significant contribution to Latvian cultural life, boost the country’s global profile, and increase the tourist attractiveness of Latvia and Riga.”
Read more at www.petraven.info
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