len blavatnik new yacht

SuRi Yacht – The Amazing $45M – Superyacht

The Best Yacht Concepts From Around The World

The Stunning Ritz Carlton EVRIMA Yacht

Gliding Across Tokyo’s Sumida River: The Mesmerizing Zipper Boat

• Zuretti Interior Design
• Zuretti Interior
• Zuccon International Project
• Ziyad al Manaseer
• Zaniz Interiors. Kutayba Alghanim
• Yuriy Kosiuk
• Yuri Milner
• Yersin Yacht

• Superyachts

ODESSA II Yacht – Exceptional $80M Superyacht

It was built by Nobiskrug and designed by Focus Yacht Design and H2 Yacht Design.

ODESSA II yacht weighs approximately 1,767 tons and cruises at speeds of 13.5 knots and can go up to a top speed of 18 knots.

ODESSA II yacht interior

ODESSA II yacht’s interior was designed by H2 Yacht Design, a design studio established back in 1994 by Jonny Horsfield.

He always had a passion for interior designing and has been in the industry for over 30 years, making him very known in the community for his involvement in more than 100 yachts.

One of the yachts with which H2 yacht design was involved was the GRACEFUL yacht, built by  Blohm & Voss is an 82-meter superyacht capable of cruising at speeds of 16 knots and can go to a top speed of 18 knots.

Another is the TALISMAN C yacht, a 70.54-meter vessel weighing 1560 tons, and can welcome 12 guests and be host to up to 19 crew members.

Inside the ODESSA II yacht, guests can spend their time using her amenities such as a beauty salon, spa, sauna room, a beach club, a full gym, exercise equipment, and a deck jacuzzi.

She also features complete air conditioning and has access to Wifi.

Hosting guests is also not a problem; she can welcome up to 12 guests using her cabins with specifications of 1 Master, 2 Doubles, 2 Twins, 1 Single, and 1 Convertible.

She can also fit up to 19 qualified onboard crew members.

Specifications

ODESSA II yacht has an overall length of 240.1 feet or 73.17 meters, a beam of 39.4 feet or 12 meters, and a draft of 12 feet or 3.65 meters.

She has a teak deck built by Nobiskrug back in 2013 and has not been refitted since.

She weighs 1,767 tons and is currently powered by diesel-type 16V 4000 engines capable of outputting 3720 hp, enabling her to cruise at 13.5 knots and go up to maximum speeds of 18 knots.

With her massive fuel tanks and her incredibly efficient engines, she can cover distances of up to 4,500 nautical miles.

Do you have anything to add to this listing?

• Focus Yacht Design
• Len Blavatnik
• MTU Engines
• Odessa II Yacht

Love Yachts? Join us.

Related posts.

SLIPSTREAM Yacht – Unrivaled $50M Superyacht

BELONGERS Yacht -Indulgent $25 M Superyacht

Unveiling The Kensho Yacht: A 75-Meter Masterpiece

NOURAH OF RIYAD Yacht – Luminous $70M Superyacht

10 of the most impressive superyachts owned by billionaires

From a sailing yacht owned by a russian billionaire industrialist to the luxury launch of the patek philippe ceo, here are the best billionaire-owned boats on the water….

Words: Jonathan Wells

There’s something about billionaires and big boats . Whether they’re superyachts or megayachts, men with money love to splash out on these sizeable sea-going giants. And that all began in 1954 — with the big dreams of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Onassis, keen to keep his luxury lifestyle afloat when at sea, bought Canadian anti-submarine frigate HMCS Stormont after World War II. He spent millions turning it into an opulent super yacht, named it after his daughter — and the Christina O kicked off a trend among tycoons. To this day, the world’s richest men remain locked in an arms race to build the biggest, fastest, most impressive superyacht of all. Here are 10 of our favourites…

Eclipse, owned by Roman Abramovich

Built by: Blohm+Voss of Hamburg, with interiors and exteriors designed by Terence Disdale. Launched in 2009, it cost $500 million (the equivalent of £623 million today).

Owned by: Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, the owner of private investment company Millhouse LLC and owner of Chelsea Football Club. His current net worth is $17.4 billion.

Key features: 162.5 metres in length / 9 decks / Top speed of 22 knots / Two swimming pools / Disco hall / Mini submarine / 2 helicopter pads / 24 guest cabins

Sailing Yacht A, owned by Andrey Melnichenko

Built by: Nobiskrug, a shipyard on the Eider River in Germany. The original idea came from Jacques Garcia, with interiors designed by Philippe Starck and a reported price tag of over $400 million.

Owned by: Russian billionaire industrialist Andrey Melnichenko, the main beneficiary of both the fertiliser producing EuroChem Group and the coal energy company SUEK. Though his current net worth is $18.7 billion, Sailing Yacht A was seized in Trieste on 12 March 2022 due to the EU’s sanctions on Russian businessmen.

Key features: 119 metres in length / 8 decks / Top speed of 21 knots / Freestanding carbon-fibre rotating masts / Underwater observation pod / 14 guests

Symphony, owned by Bernard Arnault

Built by: Feadship, the fabled shipyard headquartered in Haarlem in The Netherlands. With an exterior designed by Tim Heywood, it reportedly cost around $150 million to construct.

Owned by: French billionaire businessman and art collector Bernard Arnault. Chairman and chief executive of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company, his current net worth is $145.8 billion.

Key features: 101.5 metres in length / 6 decks / Top speed of 22 knots / 6-metre glass-bottom swimming pool / Outdoor cinema / Sundeck Jacuzzi / 8 guest cabins

Faith, owned by Michael Latifi

Built by: Similarly to Symphony above, also Feadship. With exteriors designed by Beaulieu-based RWD, and interiors by Chahan Design, it cost a reported $200 million to construct in 2017.

Owned by: Until recently, Canadian billionaire and part-owner of the Aston Martin Formula 1 Team , Lawrence Stroll. Recently sold to Michael Latifi, father of F1 star Nicholas , a fellow Canadian businessman with a net worth of just under $2 billion.

Key features: 97 metres in length / 9 guest cabins / Glass-bottom swimming pool — with bar / Bell 429 helicopter

Amevi, owned by Lakshmi Mittal

Built by: The Oceanco shipyard, also in The Netherlands. With exterior design by Nuvolari & Lenard and interior design by Alberto Pinto, it launched in 2007 (and cost around $125 million to construct).

Owned by: Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, chairman and CEO of Arcelor Mittal, the world’s largest steelmaking company. He owns 20% of Queen Park Rangers, and has a net worth of $18 billion.

Key features: 80 metres in length / 6 decks / Top speed of 18.5 knots / On-deck Jacuzzi / Helipad / Swimming Pool / Tender Garage / 8 guest cabins

Odessa II, owned by Len Blavatnik

Built by: Nobiskrug, the same German shipyard that built Sailing Yacht A . Both interior and exterior were created by Focus Yacht Design, and the yacht was launched in 2013 with a cost of $80 million.

Owned by: British businessman Sir Leonard Blavatnik. Founder of Access Industries — a multinational industrial group with current holdings in Warner Music Group, Spotify and the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat — he is worth $39.9 billion.

Key features: 74 metres in length / 6 guest cabins / Top speed of 18 knots / Intimate beach club / Baby grand piano / Private master cabhin terrace / Outdoor cinema

Nautilus, owned by Thierry Stern

Built by: Italian shipyard Perini Navi in 2014. With interiors by Rémi Tessier and exterior design by Philippe Briand, Nautilus was estimated to cost around $90 million to construct.

Owned by: Patek Philippe CEO Thierry Stern. Alongside his Gulstream G650 private jet, Nautilus — named for the famous sports watch — is his most costly mode of transport. His current net worth is $3 billion.

Key features: 73 metres in length / 7 guest cabins / Top speed of 16.5 knots / Dedicated wellness deck / 3.5 metre resistance pool / Underfloor heating / Jet Skis

Silver Angel, owned by Richard Caring

Built by: Luxury Italian boatbuilder Benetti. Launched in 2009, the yacht’s interior has been designed by Argent Design and her exterior styling is by Stefano Natucci.

Owned by: Richard Caring, British businessman and multi-millionaire (his wealth peaked at £1.05 billion, so he still makes the cut). Chairman of Caprice Holdings, he owns The Ivy restaurants.

Key features: 64.5 metres in length / Cruising speed of 15 knots / 7 guest cabins / Lalique decor / 5 decks / Oval Jacuzzi pool / Sun deck bar / Aft deck dining table

Lady Beatrice, owned by Frederick Barclay

Built by: Feadship and Royal Van Lent in 1993. Exteriors were created by De Voogt Naval Architects, with interiors by Bannenberg Designs. She cost the equivalent of £63 million to build.

Owned by: Sir David Barclay and his late brother Sir Frederick. The ‘Barclay Brothers’ had joint business pursuits including The Spectator , The Telegraph and delivery company Yodel. Current net worth: £7 billion.

Key features: 60 metres in length / 18 knots maximum speed / Monaco home port / Named for the brothers’ mother, Beatrice Cecelia Taylor / 8 guest cabins

Space, owned by Laurence Graff

Built by: Space was the first in Feadship’s F45 Vantage series , styled by Sinot Exclusive Yacht Design and launched in 2007. She cost a reported $25 million to construct.

Owned by: Laurence Graff, English jeweller and billionaire businessman. As the founder of Graff Diamonds, he has a global business presence and a current net worth of $6.26 billion.

Key features: 45 metres in length / Top speed of 16 knots / Al fresco dining area / Sun deck Jacuzzi / Breakfast bar / Swimming platform / Steam room

Want more yachts? Here’s the handcradfted, homegrown history of Princess…

Become a Gentleman’s Journal member. Find out more here.

Become a Gentleman’s Journal Member?

Like the Gentleman’s Journal? Why not join the Clubhouse, a special kind of private club where members receive offers and experiences from hand-picked, premium brands. You will also receive invites to exclusive events, the quarterly print magazine delivered directly to your door and your own membership card.

Further reading

A bigger splash: The best RIB brands on the market

Riding the wave: the Wajer 44 S is catnip for water sports enthusiasts

The luxury yachts of the world's royal families

A free newsletter worth opening.

To receive the latest in style, watches, cars and luxury news, plus receive great offers from the world’s greatest brands every Friday.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

From Russian oil to rock’n’roll: the rise of Len Blavatnik

• From Russian oil to rock’n’roll: the rise of Len Blavatnik on x (opens in a new window)
• From Russian oil to rock’n’roll: the rise of Len Blavatnik on facebook (opens in a new window)
• From Russian oil to rock’n’roll: the rise of Len Blavatnik on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• From Russian oil to rock’n’roll: the rise of Len Blavatnik on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Henry Foy and Max Seddon in Moscow

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox.

Striding the halls of an English stately home, dressed in full costume as Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli,  Len Blavatnik was celebrating his 60th birthday. Grammy-winner Bruno Mars sang. Guests — some in frock coats, others dressed as Leo Tolstoy, Rasputin or Chinese emissaries — mixed with rock stars, celebrities and business tycoons. 

Themed as an imaginary conference chaired by Disraeli, the June 2017 party was emblematic of Blavatnik’s extraordinary rise from his birth in Soviet Ukraine to one of the UK’s richest people.

Clues to his success lay in the guest list that evening. Pillars of the British establishment rubbed shoulders with Russian oligarchs. American entertainment executives mingled with former Kremlin apparatchiks as film stars sipped champagne.

Straddling these worlds was Blavatnik, an entrepreneur who reaped phenomenal riches from the chaotic world of 1990s Russian cowboy capitalism, and who cashed in that wealth in favour of western investments and a place in British and American high society. 

Over two decades, he extracted more than $14bn from Russia’s natural resources industry, the biggest financial gain of any individual foreign investor in the country and the bedrock of his approximate $25bn net wealth today,  as estimated by Bloomberg . 

“He made his money [in Russia], almost all his money here, and then just made investments outside,” says Viktor Vekselberg, Blavatnik’s college friend, with whom he partnered to own major stakes in Russia’s biggest aluminium company and its third-largest oil producer. “I don’t see that he made a lot of money outside Russia, sorry. All his main money, he made here in Russia, with me.” 

Less than a year after the party, Vekselberg and the aluminium oligarch  Oleg Deripaska — two men with whom Blavatnik had made billions of dollars — would be  sanctioned by the US , excluded from the western financial system and made international pariahs. In stark contrast, Blavatnik was named Sir Leonard in the days after the party,  knighted by the Queen for his philanthropic work just seven years after obtaining British citizenship. 

How did Blavatnik convert his Russian-made billions into a seat at the top table of the British establishment while avoiding the fate of many contemporaries? The answer lies partly in assiduous reputation management. Few in the west, outside elite business circles, know of the Siberian aluminium deals or courtroom battles for control of oil assets that built his first fortune. And that is how he likes it. 

Blavatnik’s exceptionally large gifts to respected western institutions, from Tate to Harvard, have earned him admiration as one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. At the same time he has maintained an obsessional level of privacy around his personal life, avoiding the pitfalls of oligarchs such as  Roman Abramovich  or Deripaska.

Perhaps most importantly, unlike his peers who made similar fortunes from the former USSR’s vast natural resources, Blavatnik steered clear of the Kremlin, leaving it to his partners to handle the political ties required of big Russian businesses. He thus avoided a Faustian pact that offered budding oligarchs asset protection in exchange for loyalty: it was to become a critical distinction, given today’s western backlash against President Vladimir Putin and his court.

Blavatnik’s pivot to western investments and high-profile philanthropy was exquisitely timed. In 2013, a year before Russia annexed Crimea and Moscow’s international reputation began to plummet, he almost wholly cashed out of Russia and refocused on an international conglomerate that spans chemicals giant LyondellBasell, Hollywood movies, luxury hotels such as the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, and  Warner Music Group .

“He saw his business in Russia as working in an emerging market,” says Mark Garber, a close friend. “Like an American businessman who invests in Africa, for example, but does not dive in completely. He was very smart to take all his money out, invest it, and keep it safely hidden away.”

Many Russian-made billionaires have sought to build a profile in the west, only to be caught out as the geopolitical faultlines between Russia and the US have widened in recent years. Those who attempted to maintain their influence in Moscow while building new lives in Europe or the US have found themselves shunned by both. 

To the tycoons with whom he used to associate, Blavatnik’s position is a source of jealousy and perplexity. “It’s crazy how he has managed it, nobody understands how and everyone wants to,” says one Russian-born billionaire with a home in London. 

Of the dozens of Blavatnik’s business partners, friends, employees and former associates that the FT spoke to for this article, almost all point to his skill at exploiting his Soviet roots while always positioning himself as an outsider in Russia and a local in the west. 

Blavatnik declined a request for an interview with the FT for this article. His head of press relations asks reporters to confirm that Blavatnik will not be referred to as an oligarch in any article before agreeing to arrange potential interviews. Those who do use that word are left to face complaints from his lawyers, who also protest when the fact of his Ukrainian birth is publicised without clarity about his US and UK citizenships.

Lincoln Benet, chief executive of Access, the holding company that Blavatnik created in 1986, tells the FT that his boss should be written about with “a combination of generosity and admiration . . . How many people do you know who can be engaged [sic] with  Ed Sheeran , as well as, you know, being at the Harvard Medical School, or with [former BP chief]  John Browne ?”

It is a remarkable position to be in. It is also a case study in the emollient power of billionaire philanthropy, during a period when western politicians of all stripes went out of their way to welcome the global super-rich.

Leonid Valentinovich Blavatnik was born in 1957 in Odessa, the Black Sea port in today’s Ukraine. His parents moved to Yaroslavl, a Russian city north of Moscow, when Blavatnik was a child. He and Vekselberg, another Ukrainian Jew, became close friends at one of the only high-ranking colleges in Moscow to accept Jewish people, who were then subject to widespread discrimination in the country.

At the age of 21, Blavatnik moved to South Brooklyn, New York. Over the next decade, he flourished in his new home: earning a masters in computer science at Columbia and an MBA at Harvard Business School, falling in love with and marrying Emily Appelson, an American media executive he met at a house party. Leonid became Leonard and gained US citizenship in 1984. He created Access as an investment vehicle. By the end of the 1980s, he had made his first million dollars.

That CV would later be critical to his success in Russia. There, almost all the would-be oligarchs were teaching themselves capitalism as they went along, and here was a Russian-speaking millionaire with an American passport. “Len was very much a man of the world, even back then,” says one longstanding business partner. “He had been educated in the US, he understood money and international finance as if it were second nature. He had been trained. In the strange inequality of the Soviet Union, that made him different.”

It was his old friend Vekselberg, after a chance meeting in the late 1980s at a US petrochemicals exhibition, who convinced him that vast riches were lying in wait in the former USSR. 

“I was very sceptical. I’d been living in America for a long time and had a company,” Blavatnik told a 2015 gala in Moscow celebrating 25 years since the founding of their partnership, according to a video of his speech seen by the FT. “But Viktor’s amazing powers of persuasion prevailed.”

Soon the two men were huddled around a small table in Vekselberg’s cramped Moscow apartment, where he lived with his wife, daughter and in-laws. (“Those 23 square metres were a key part of why I wanted to go into private business,” Vekselberg told the gala.) They set up a company: Renova, a nod to the  perestroika — renovation — initiative that allowed for private business in the Soviet Union. 

“Those who remember know how business was being done at that time: morning, afternoon and evening meetings began with a shot of vodka,” Blavatnik told the audience, describing how they would drive around in a beaten-up Soviet Volga with a large briefcase stuffed with papers and a BB gun. 

The market the young friends were trying to break into in the early 1990s was not for the timid. Encouraged by western advisers, then-president Boris Yeltsin was selling off scores of state-owned mines, refineries and factories in often dubiously administered tenders. 

Blavatnik had both the international cachet to attract foreign backers and the local smarts required to succeed. “He understands Russian rules very well, and used these rules as much as any other. You have to be friendly with the authorities, and if you can take something, you take,” says a local businessman who was operating at the same time.

With Vekselberg handling much of the local work and Blavatnik running international sales from New York, their initial moves were in Russia’s aluminium business. The pair began accumulating shares in smelters during a period when violence, extortion and organised crime were real threats. The era was later dubbed the “ aluminium wars ”. But there was more money to be made in oil. 

In 1997, Blavatnik and Vekselberg teamed up with another Ukrainian-born businessman,  Mikhail Fridman , co-founder of one of Russia’s most important and influential conglomerates, Alfa Group, who would himself go on to amass a multibillion-dollar fortune. 

The trio launched AAR (Alfa, Access, Renova) and bought 40 per cent of a struggling oil producer called TNK for $800m. The tender was run by Alfred Kokh, a government official and friend of Blavatnik’s (Kokh later joined the board of TNK). Working with Fridman’s Alfa Group took Blavatnik and Vekselberg, relative newcomers among the emerging tycoons, to another level. “Maybe [Vekselberg] knew some governors where the factories were, but nothing on the level of [the major oligarchs],” Kokh tells the FT.

Alfa owned one of Russia’s largest banks and had helped bankroll Yeltsin’s re-election campaign. Fridman’s partner was former privatisation adviser Pyotr Aven, who handled the group’s government relations. With Alfa as a partner, Blavatnik gained the political clout he had previously lacked — and was averse to building himself. AAR soon won full control of TNK and began looking to expand aggressively, by acquiring assets from competitors. 

One such rival was Sidanco, part-owned by British oil major BP. Through  controversial bankruptcy proceedings , it was systematically broken up against its owners’ will and its best assets sold off, mainly to TNK, for prices below the value of their reserves. 

A 1999 lawsuit brought in New York accused Blavatnik, Access and its partners of having “stolen” assets from Sidanco. Blavatnik’s side sought to have the lawsuit dismissed. It was later dropped after the companies merged. 

The legal blowback to this audacious empire-building unnerved Blavatnik, according to a number of those who worked with him at the time. While Fridman and Vekselberg became well known in the rough and tumble of Russia’s early capitalism, Blavatnik sought a lower profile — a shrewd approach that would later smooth his path in the west. 

“He never really tried to have any deep ties to the Kremlin as far as I could tell,” Kokh says. “He didn’t do any government relations or management. That was all his partners. He never got into it himself.” 

Blavatnik’s role lay elsewhere as the bridge to BP, which was still seething after losing more than $200m through Sidanco’s dismemberment. When  Browne , BP’s chief executive, refused to speak with Fridman for an entire year, Blavatnik conducted back-channel talks with Rodney Chase, Browne’s deputy. 

“I worked here [in Russia], he was outside,” Vekselberg tells the FT. “He was a partner with whom I could discuss and reach the right decision. If I had been alone, for sure I would have made mistakes. He is a more balanced person, he protected me from sharp statements. [He would say] ‘Wait, don’t do this.’ I am ready to fight more — he is a more peaceful person, a communicator.”

The outreach worked. In 2003, four years after BP had sued TNK and its owners for taking away its best Russian asset, the British company  spent $8bn to form TNK-BP in Russia’s biggest foreign investment deal, giving Blavatnik, Vekselberg and Fridman billions of dollars, and the cachet of blue-chip western partners. 

“I knew that putting more money into a country where we had already had our fingers burnt was high risk,” Browne wrote in his memoir  Beyond Business (2010). “[But] to me it was essential to be there.”

While his partners embraced their new prominence as Russian billionaires, Blavatnik moved in another direction. A year after the TNK-BP agreement, signed during Putin’s state visit to the UK, Blavatnik spent some of his estimated $2bn proceeds on a £41m, 10-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, bookended by the Russian and Israeli embassies. 

The move propelled him into London’s elite. In contrast, and in a sign of their diverging priorities, Vekselberg splashed $100m on a collection of nine Fabergé imperial Easter eggs, saying he wanted to “give back to my country some of its most revered treasures”.

While Vekselberg oversaw the aluminium and oil assets in Russia, Blavatnik focused on putting down roots in London. He befriended Browne, a prominent member of the British establishment, who began introducing him in the social circles that would later toast his 60th birthday. He became close to  Lord George Weidenfeld , the late publishing magnate, who encouraged him to make donations to academic institutions, and he hired  Sir Michael Pakenham , a distinguished former British diplomat, as an adviser. All three helped acquaint him with high society. 

Blavatnik also diversified his business away from Russia. In 2004, he bought a stake in Warner Music, and a year later paid $5.7bn for Basell Polyolefins, a big petrochemicals producer. Those who worked, invested or socialised with Blavatnik in the US or the UK during this period say he very rarely spoke of his Russian assets. 

“I knew next to nothing — maybe not even next to — about what he was doing in Russia,” says Edgar Bronfman Jr, the US businessman who later sold him the rest of Warner Music.

By then, Access was in effect two companies, one overseeing Blavatnik’s highly profitable but low-maintenance Russian fortune, another for his chemicals and entertainment businesses. “He always told me that his claim to fame was he made most of his money while being a minority partner,” says Alexander Akopov, Blavatnik’s longtime partner in the Russian media industry. “Which means that he is always a guy who can find the right people who are doing the right things and become part of it at a good moment.”

In 2008, long-simmering tensions between TNK and BP exploded into public view, when Russian armed police raided the company’s Moscow office. Months later, Bob Dudley, the joint venture’s BP-appointed chief executive, fled Russia claiming  sustained harassment . BP claimed its Russian partners were attempting to take control of the entire company. 

While the tycoons have always denied involvement in what a leaked US diplomatic cable described as a concerted campaign to “get rid of the western managers”, Dudley was eventually replaced as head by Fridman.

The tussle was a headache for Blavatnik, who, unlike his partners, had a profile in London and New York to worry about. But he was rewarded for sticking with TNK-BP in 2013 when  AAR sold its stake to Russian oil company Rosneft for $28bn. Blavatnik promptly invested his $7bn windfall in the west. “It was probably the most successful repatriation of assets from Russia in history,” says one Soviet-born oligarch operating at the same time.

Blavatnik succeeded in Russia while staying out of the spotlight. His activities in the west have been more conspicuous. His purchase of Warner Music for $3.3bn in 2011 was the first step in what he said was a mission to build a global media empire. “After he got into the music business . . . he told me, ‘There won’t be any money, but it’ll be fun,’” says Garber. “Now, much later, he says, ‘There’s money, but it’s no fun.’”

Blavatnik’s friends say he is drawn to entertainment by a flair for the theatrical. “He loves performing a role . . . it allows him to relax, de-stress,” says Vekselberg. He had a cameo as the Swedish ambassador in a Russian mini-series about Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother. At a 1930s-themed US embassy party in Moscow in 2010, he appeared in a Soviet general’s tunic, even though none of the other guests was in costume. 

Blavatnik with Ed Sheeran at a party following the Brit Awards in 2015

With Rita Ora at a pre-Grammy party in Los Angeles this year

With Chris Martin of Coldplay at a Grammy celebration in LA in 2014

“The entertainment business has given Len three things: it has been [a] tremendous investment, it has given him a lot of pleasure, and it has increased his visibility,” says Bronfman. “Having said that, visibility is a double-edged sword . . . With [his money] comes a lot of scrutiny, which I am not sure is entirely welcome.”

Like many billionaire philanthropists, Blavatnik has channelled this scrutiny in specific ways. While he is intensely private about his business interests in Russia and rarely gives interviews, he has ensured his name is prominent in various cultural institutions across the world. Encouraged by Weidenfeld and masterminded by Browne, Blavatnik donated £75m to Oxford university in 2010 to set up the  Blavatnik School of Government . 

A donation of more than £50m — an amount “almost unprecedented in Tate’s history”, according to its then director — helped finance  Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building . That gift was also brokered by Browne, then chair of the museum’s trustees (the position is now held by the FT’s editor Lionel Barber). The new entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum is named the Blavatnik Hall. A $200m donation to Harvard Medical School last year set up the Blavatnik Institute. 

“He clearly wants to make sure that there is a legacy of philanthropy that he can leave, as well as a legacy of business,” says Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, Blavatnik’s alma mater and another recipient of his donations. “He wants to do things that will have enduring impact.”

“He’s like [oil barons] Armand Hammer, [Calouste] Gulbenkian: an old-school international businessman,” says Kokh. “Everyone has their own agenda. Blavatnik likes having his name on buildings. So what?”

Yet Blavatnik’s donations have met some resistance in the west. The 2010 donation to Oxford sparked a backlash from academics and activists who said the university was “selling its reputation and prestige to Putin’s associates” and should reject the money due to Blavatnik’s involvement with the TNK-BP dispute. 

Pressure increased after suspicions arose in the US that Russia helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. In 2017, a professor at Blavatnik’s Oxford school resigned after it emerged that Blavatnik’s company had donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration committee. 

Last December, Charles Davidson, director of an anti-kleptocracy programme at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think-tank, quit after Blavatnik bought a $50,000 table at its annual gala. Davidson cited “the influence of Putin’s oligarchs on America’s political system and society [and] the importation of corrupt Russian business practices and values”. Hudson returned the donation. 

In a statement, Blavatnik’s spokesman alleged that Davidson’s departure was “already planned and overdue” and that Davidson wanted to “have it appear that he was resigning as a matter of principle rather than for cause”. (The think-tank and Davidson declined to comment.) 

In Russia, Blavatnik’s charitable giving sets him apart from other billionaires known for splurging on football clubs and yachts. “At least university campuses get built,” says Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader and fierce critic of Putin’s oligarchic entourage. “As far as Russia and I are concerned, he’s not a political oligarch. He isn’t buying newspapers here, he isn’t intimidating journalists, he basically isn’t involved with Putin at all.”

Blavatnik’s status in the west has clearly been protected by the concerted effort he made to distance himself from Russian politics and, in particular, from Putin. Blavatnik’s representatives say he has not met the Russian president since 2000. Kremlin officials tell the FT that he was never a regular visitor. Friends say Vekselberg often represented their shared interests.

Blavatnik has been less guarded when it comes to US politics. While he has donated to both Democrats and Republicans over the past decade, in the lead-up to the 2016 election he and his companies donated  more than $6m to Republican campaigns. As well as the donation to Trump’s inauguration committee, Vekselberg told the FT he sat on a table paid for by Blavatnik at the inauguration party. (Blavatnik’s spokesman denied this and said in a statement that Blavatnik “did not meet or speak with Viktor Vekselberg” at the inauguration.) 

In April 2018, the US sanctioned Vekselberg — plus Deripaska and five other Russian oligarchs and their companies — for “malign activities” in support of Putin’s regime. Along with having to give up control of his companies to keep them operating, Vekselberg is banned from doing business with any US citizens, including Blavatnik. “Of course, last year it was sensitive for all of us,” Vekselberg tells the FT. “Legally, [Blavatnik and I] cannot communicate. From time to time, he gets a licence [from the US Treasury], we can talk.”

When asked if he could imagine doing business with his former partner again, Vekselberg pauses. “This is not an easy time, emotionally. It is not easy. Practically, it will be difficult [to work with him again]. You should understand our relationship. Len is my friend. He is very active in Russia, but very rarely asks me to help him in Russia, because he has his own connections. I am active in the US, but rarely ask him for help there. This is our relationship.”

There is no mention of Russian business activities in  Blavatnik’s biography on Access’s website, nor trace of its remaining Russian industrial asset: its stake in Sual Partners, the vehicle still jointly controlled by him and Vekselberg. Sual owns a 26.5 per cent stake in the aluminium giant Rusal, where Blavatnik was a board member from 2007 to 2016. 

Rusal was taken off the sanctions list in January this year after Deripaska reached an agreement with Washington to give up control of the company. Days later, Democratic lawmakers accused Treasury secretary  Steven Mnuchin of cutting Rusal a favourable deal and alleged he had a conflict of interest after Access bought a stake in a film company linked to Mnuchin in 2017.

Both Access and Mnuchin deny that Blavatnik’s company acquired any shares from Mnuchin. In a statement, Blavatnik’s spokesman said: “Neither Mr Blavatnik nor any Access-related individual or representative has ever engaged in any lobbying activities with regard to Rusal.”

The decision to lift sanctions on Rusal nevertheless boosted Blavatnik’s wealth: the shares Access holds in Sual give it an indirect stake in Rusal of less than 10 per cent in the $5.5bn company.

It has been almost three decades since Blavatnik and Vekselberg sat on a New York rooftop and discussed the riches on offer in Russia. Today, thanks in part to the money they made together, Blavatnik owns property worth more than $250m in Manhattan, while Vekselberg is banned from visiting.

“Len and Viktor chose different paths. There is a fight between Russia and the west. It is not a very smart fight. But Viktor chose the wrong side. And Blavatnik chose the right side, the stronger side,” says the Soviet-born oligarch who made his fortune at the same time. “[Len] became Lord of the Dance . . . a Sir, a noble person. Viktor is the world’s enemy.”

Just as there will likely never again be such a remarkable shift of wealth from public to private hands as he and his peers enjoyed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there will also likely never be another Blavatnik. The gates through which his fortune passed from east to west have slammed shut. His rise took place during a period of late-20th and early-21st century capitalism when money flowed with extraordinary freedom across borders and oceans, and when the western establishment eagerly welcomed the owners of that money.

“I would like to congratulate Viktor, and also thank him for persuading me to start a joint business many years ago,” Blavatnik said at the 2015 gala in Moscow. “Thanks again, that you persuaded me on that roof.” 

Henry Foy is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief. Max Seddon is an FT Moscow correspondent

Follow  @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to  FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

Promoted Content

Follow the topics in this article.

• Life & Arts Add to myFT
• Audio articles Add to myFT
• Russian business & finance Add to myFT
• Leonard Blavatnik Add to myFT
• FT Magazine Add to myFT

Comments have not been enabled for this article.

• INSIDER REVIEWS
• TECH BUYING GUIDES

Meet Len Blavatnik, the richest man in Britain

Blavatnik attended moscow university of railway engineering until his family immigrated to the us in 1978..

He went on to earn his masters degree in computer science at Columbia University and his MBA at Harvard Business School. He remained loyal to his alma mater: In 2013, he donated $50 million to Harvard to sponsor life sciences entrepreneurship.

In 1986, Blavatnik founded Access Industries, a privately held industrial company. Initially, AI was involved in Russian investments but has since diversified its portfolio.

Access Industries earns its fortune through three major sectors: natural resources and chemicals, media and telecommunications, and real estate.

Blavatnik has partnered with Faena Group since 2000 to transform Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Argentina.

Source: LinkedIn

Blavatnik also has an interest in fashion. His company became the first and largest outside investor in leading worldwide retailer Tory Burch when it purchased 20% of the company in 2004.

Source: Bloomberg

AI acquired Atlantic, Warner Bros. Records, Rhino, and Warner Music Nashville when he purchased Warner Music in 2011. He also recently picked up Parlophone, a British music label that manages the likes of Coldplay and Two Door Cinema Club.

Source: The Guardian

Blavatnik owns AI Film, the independent film and production company that’s behind acclaimed film Lee Daniels’ The Butler and the summer 2015 release Mr. Holmes.

The billionaire splits his time between New York and London. In 2004, he bought his first UK property on Kensington Palace Gardens, an area in London where the mega-rich reside. He spent years refurbishing the home — it's now worth an estimated value of over $315 million.

Source: Daily Mail

Late last year, he purchased famed New York Jets owner Woody Johnson’s apartment in Manhattan for $75 million.

Blavatnik is married to Emily Appelson Blavatnik. Together they have four children — two boys and two girls. It’s rumored that Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran — clients of WMG — were hired to perform at Blavatnik’s daughters' bat mitzvahs.

Blavatnik hosts an exclusive luncheon aboard his yacht, The Odessa at Old Port, during the Cannes Film Festival in France every year along with film partner and friend Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company.

The billionaire is a notable and global philanthropist. The Blavatnik Family Foundation has been a generous supporter of cultural and charitable institutions for more than 15 years: It proudly supports The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Royal Academy of Arts, and Colel Chabad, a 20,000-square-foot food bank and warehouse in Israel. He recently made a donation of $20 million to Tel Aviv University (TAU) to launch the Blavatnik initiative.

In 2007, Blavatnik created the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. The annual awards recognize achievements of young postdoctoral and faculty scientists in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Each year, three unrestricted cash prizes of $250,000 are also awarded to America's most innovative scientific researchers.

In 2010, he donated $117 million to University of Oxford in England to establish The Blavatnik School of Government (BSG). It's the youngest department at the University — its first class of 38 students was admitted in 2012 to the Master in Public Policy program.

Source: University of Oxford

Blavatnik's fortune grew in 2013 when JPMorgan Chase was ordered to pay him $50 million after he claimed they wrongfully advised him, causing him to lose 10% of his $1 billion investment.

Source: Reuters

SEE ALSO: The 25 richest self-made billionaires »

Popular right now.

Advertisement

The rise of billionaire Len Blavatnik, one of Wall Street’s greatest dealmakers

Last month, Business Insider published a list of the richest people on earth . Ukraine-born American investor Leonard Blavatnik came in at No. 42 with a net worth of  $16.7 billion .

The self-made billionaire's wealth has ballooned in recent years thanks to his privately held industrial group, Access Industries, which has major global investments in chemicals, real estate, and entertainment. 

Blavatnik is perhaps best known for his legendary  investment in chemical company LyondellBasell , but since buying Warner Music Group in 2011, he's  become a force in Hollywood, too.

Here's a look at how Blavatnik became one of the world's most vaunted dealmakers. 

Blavatnik attended Moscow University of Railway Engineering until his family immigrated to the US in 1978 — he gained citizenship in 1984.

Source: Wealth-X

He went on to earn his masters degree in computer science at Columbia University and his MBA at Harvard Business School. He has remained loyal to his alma mater, donating $50 million to Harvard in 2013 to sponsor life sciences entrepreneurship.

In 1986, Blavatnik founded Access Industries, a privately held industrial company. Initially, AI was involved in Russian investments but has since diversified its portfolio. AI now invests natural resources and chemicals, media and telecommunications, technology and e-commerce, and real estate.

The Russian-American is known for his lucrative, and often risky, business deals. In 2011, he lifted petrochemicals maker LyondellBasell out of bankruptcy amid the financial crisis for north of $2 billion. By 2014, the value of his stake had jumped to more than $10 billion, leading some to call it the greatest deal in Wall Street history. The Federal Trade Commission slapped him with a comparatively tiny $656,000 fine last year for failing to properly report his investments in the company.

Source: Forbes , Billboard

He's also made power moves in fashion. Blavatnik's company became the first and largest outside investor in upscale fashion and accessories brand Tory Burch when it purchased 20% of the company in 2004. Today, AI has a 10% stake in the $3 billion powerhouse retailer.

Source: Bloomberg , Business Insider

In 2011, AI purchased Warner Music Group for $3.3 billion and acquired Atlantic, Warner Bros. Records, Rhino, and Warner Music Nashville. Blavatnik also picked up Parlophone, a British music label that manages the likes of Coldplay and Two Door Cinema Club, for $742 million.

 Source:   Reuters , THR

Blavatnik recently teamed up with Hollywood talent manager Sarah Stennett to launch First Access Entertainment. The company will focus on talent and brand development, representation of recording artists and songwriters, and rights exploitation.

Sources: Billboard , Access Industries

Blavatnik owns AI Film, the independent movie and production company that’s behind acclaimed film Lee Daniels’ "The Butler" and "Rocketman," the forthcoming Elton John biopic.

Source: AI Film

During the Cannes Film Festival in France every year, Blavatnik hosts an exclusive luncheon aboard his yacht, The Odessa at Old Port, along with film partner and friend Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company.

He's also invested in emerging technology companies Spotify and Beats Electronics. Billboard recently named him one of the 10 most powerful people in music.

Source: Billboard

He has various investments in personal and commercial real estate, too. His company has been partnered with hospitality outfit Faena Group since 2000 to transform Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Argentina.

Source: LinkedIn , Access Industries

In 2014, AI acquired the One&Only Ocean Club on Paradise Island in the Bahamas for an undisclosed amount.

Source: Caribbean Journal

In 2004, Blavatnik spent more than $100 million buying his first UK property on Kensington Palace Gardens, an area in London where the mega-rich reside (he only lives there part of the time). He spent years refurbishing the home — it's now estimated to be worth more than $300 million.

Source: Wealth-X , Variety

Last spring, Blavatnik paid $77.5 million for New York Jet's owner Woody Johnson's Manhattan apartment. There was no public listing for the apartment but original floor plans for the building show his 6,700-square-foot unit has 13 rooms, including four bedrooms and 6.5 baths.

Source: Bloomberg

Blavatnik doesn't only care about accumulating billions — he's also a notable, global philanthropist. The Blavatnik Family Foundation supports the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, and Colel Chabad, a 20,000-square-foot food bank and warehouse in Israel. In 2014, he made a donation of $20 million to Tel Aviv University to support scientific research.

Source:  Philanthropy News Digest

• Main content

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Music’s Mystery Mogul: Len Blavatnik, Trump and Their Russian Friends

Len Blavatnik is not only a backer of films and potential buyer of a Hollywood studio but also reportedly on the fringe of the Russia probe thanks to GOP giving and links to oligarchs with ties to Putin.

By Kim Masters

Kim Masters

Editor-at-Large

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

In May 2013, Martin Scorsese went to the Cannes Film Festival — not to be feted but to pitch a project: Silence , his not-exactly-commercial saga of two priests in 17th century Japan. The director had dinner aboard billionaire Len Blavatnik’s 164-foot yacht, Odessa, named for his birthplace in Ukraine. Scorsese and Blavatnik then headed to a lavish party hosted by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, owner of the English Premier League’s Chelsea F.C., who, like Blavatnik, had made his fortune following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Abramovich was hosting director Baz Luhrmann, whose The Great Gatsby was having its premiere at the festival. One observer was struck by the scene: “Len got to arrive with his prestigious guest and Abramovich was there with his, so it was oligarchs showing their connections.” Now, sources say, Blavatnik is negotiating a major multiplatform deal with Luhrmann, and Warner Bros. plans to make a long-gestating Elvis Presley film with the Australian director, presumably with Blavatnik’s backing.

Related Stories

Welcome to p1harmony's second chapter, how u.k. music is soundtracking hollywood hits, such as 'alien: romulus,' helped by the l.a. sync mission.

The use of the O-word would annoy Blavatnik, 61. The press-shy billionaire has long maintained that he’s not an oligarch but a naturalized American citizen who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a young man in 1978. Nonetheless, he has found himself on the radar of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to ABC News. Amid the drumbeat of the probe of Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. election, Blavatnik is on a quest to achieve his stated goal of building a “media platform for the 21st century.”

Since 2011, Blavatnik has been the owner of Warner Music Group . But so far, like many outsiders who try to stake a claim in Hollywood, getting meaningful and gainful traction there has proved elusive. In the past couple of years, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, he’s taken shots at acquiring major stakes in Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures. He’s also been in the somewhat antithetical position of investing in prestige films with players who have later become among the most toxic in Hollywood: Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner. Among the projects he’s backed: Lee Daniels’ The Butler , Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and, yes, Scorsese’s Silence . Blavatnik also has extensive entertainment interests in Britain, Israel and Russia.

Until last April, Blavatnik was a financier of Warner Bros.’ film slate, investing in such films as Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One , It and Annabelle: Creation . Despite Blavatnik’s close relationship with studio chairman Toby Emmerich (who, with family, stayed on Blavatnik’s yacht during the Venice Film Festival this year), Warners did not renew that deal when it expired at the end of March. The studio declined to comment but sources say going forward with new owner AT&T, Warners will no longer seek out slate deals like the one that ended a few months ago.

Blavatnik’s representatives at his privately held Access Industries did not respond to questions on this or any topic, instead providing a statement: “The poor quality of the reporter’s superficial and biased reporting and use of unnamed sources do not warrant any thoughtful response.”

When there are mountains of money potentially to be tapped, ever-hungry Hollywood doesn’t usually ask too many questions about its provenance. Blavatnik’s associates tell contacts in entertainment that he was educated in the U.S. — which is true if you don’t count elementary school through college. Yes, he made vast sums in Russia (his fortune is estimated at $18.6 billion, according to Forbes ). But Vladimir Putin? Blavatnik’s reps have said he hasn’t seen the Russian president in almost 20 years.

Ignoring the Blavatnik origin story may become a little tougher, however, as he is one of several U.S. citizens with deep foreign ties who have attracted Mueller’s attention by donating millions to GOP causes in the past few years. Foreigners are not permitted to make such donations, but as American citizens, billionaires like Blavatnik can. Among the checks that Blavatnik has written through Access is a $1 million contribution to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, which raised a record-setting $106.7 million (more than double the previous record set by Barack Obama, though Trump’s event involved a smaller staff and fewer events). What became of all that money remains a mystery.

Starting in the 2015-16 election season, Blavatnik’s political contributions “soared and made a hard right turn,” according to an analysis by business professor Ruth May in The Dallas Morning News . In that cycle, he contributed $6.35 million to Republican candidates and incumbent senators. The biggest beneficiary was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose Senate Leadership Fund received a $2.5 million donation followed by another $1 million in 2017. Blavatnik or Access gave generously to PACs associated with Sen. Lindsey Graham ($800,000) and to Sen. Marco Rubio ($1.5 million).

Married with four children, Blavatnik owns or has investments in an assortment of industries around the world: natural resources and chemicals, venture capital and real estate. He owns or has stakes in upscale hotels including the Sunset Tower in West Hollywood, the Faena Hotel Miami Beach and the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat on the Cote d’Azur.

At a glance, Blavatnik not only is a wildly successful businessman but a philanthropist who has made huge donations to uni­versities, including $117 million to Oxford (the university’s School of Government building, completed in 2015, bears his name). Oxford’s press release announcing the gift obligingly described Blavatnik as an “American industrialist and philanthropist.” That gift drew protests from a group of more than 20 critics, including academics and activists, who argued that Oxford should “stop selling its reputation and prestige to Putin’s associates.” The university responded that it has “a thorough and robust scrutiny process in place with regard to philanthropic giving,” and a spokesperson for Blavatnik’s foundation said it is focused on supporting “institutions with a track record of significant advancements in science, business and government, regardless of geographic location.” Blavatnik also has given to Harvard ($50 million) and Yale ($10 million), as well as to think tanks and other causes.

Born in Ukraine in 1957, Blavatnik spent most of his childhood in a provincial Russian town. In his teens he studied at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. The family immigrated to the U.S. when he was 21, settling in Brooklyn. He earned a master’s in computer science at Columbia University and worked in the IT department at Macy’s and at the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. He became a citizen in 1984. A couple of years later, he started Access Industries, and three years after that, he got an MBA from Harvard.

After earning his degree, he teamed up with an old classmate from the Moscow Institute: Viktor Vekselberg. The New York Times reported in May that agents for Mueller had detained Vekselberg, 61, when he arrived in New York earlier this year. Vekselberg attended Trump’s inauguration and the Times reported that Mueller’s interest in him “suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.” Vekselberg was present at a 2015 dinner in Russia at which Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was seated beside Putin. (Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition.)

In April, Vekselberg was among seven oligarchs sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, which cited Russia’s “malign activity around the globe.” His name arose again in May when lawyer Michael Avenatti alleged that a U.S. company controlled by Vekselberg and his cousin had put $500,000 into the same account that Trump associate Michael Cohen used to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels. An attorney for the company said at the time that it is controlled by Americans and that it had retained Cohen “regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.”

Unlike Blavatnik, Vekselberg is considered to have maintained close ties to the Kremlin. For a time he and Blavatnik seemed to be working in tandem to establish themselves in influential Washington circles. As reported in a 2014 New Yorker profile, in 2004 Vekselberg bought nine jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs from the Forbes family for more than $100 million and gifted them to Russia, which was viewed as a way to curry favor with Putin. In 2006, the Kennan Institute — a division of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where Blavatnik was a donor and official fundraiser — gave Vekselberg the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. After some pushback, the award was rescinded, according to The New Yorker . But the following year, the institute gave Vekselberg a public-service award. The same year, Blavatnik’s Access donated $50,000.

The sources of Blavatnik’s wealth aren’t entirely clear, but he and Vekselberg made a lot of money in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the “aluminum wars” (which pitted organized crime against Russian and foreign investors) and in oil. In the course of acquiring one takeover target in 2001, it was alleged in a lawsuit that militia members representing Blavatnik and his partners forced their way into the company’s offices dressed in fatigues and carrying guns. Blavatnik’s reps have denied this.

Blavatnik and Vekselberg have partnered with others now of interest to Mueller, including sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who paid and loaned millions to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Mikhail Fridman, head of the Alfa Group investment consortium. As noted in a 2005 court ruling, Fridman has been the subject of various “allegations of corruption and illegal conduct.” Fridman and his associate German Khan are the subject of one of the memoranda comprising the Steele dossier, which raised alarms about a possible Trump campaign conspiracy with the Russian government. But there are no allegations of impropriety with respect to these figures’ partnerships with Blavatnik and Vekselberg.

A key asset that Blavatnik brought to his partnerships was his American citizenship. He had Western connections and conveyed a sense of legitimacy lacking in some of his Russian allies. “He’s been able to walk this fine line between these two worlds,” says Diana Pilipenko, an anti-corruption expert at the Center for American Progress. “If he has, in fact, had any concerns about his reputation as a ‘Russian oligarch,’ one can see that he has gone to great lengths to launder it through philanthropy.”

In the mid-2000s, Blavatnik shifted away from the U.S. to spend more time in Britain, where he also has citizenship. He has a 13-bedroom London mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, home of some of the most expensive properties in the world. (Roman Abramovich is a neighbor.) He has amassed a serious art collection. Having hired retired diplomat Sir Michael Pakenham to advise him on how to comport himself in England, he made major contributions to the Royal Academy, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery, as well as Oxford. Last year, he was knighted by the Queen.

Blavatnik owns multiple New York properties (though The New Yorker reported that one Manhattan co-op had turned him down, possibly because he had shown up at the interview with armed bodyguards). In 2015 he bought New York Jets owner Woody Johnson’s co-op for a record-setting $77.5 million and this year paid a record $90 million for a New York City mansion, according to reports.

Following the purchase of the U.K. operations of Mel Gibson’s Icon Group in 2009, Blavatnik seemed to start exploring deeper moves into the U.S. entertainment business. He considered a $75 million investment in Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor but decided against it. The following year, he made a run at MGM, interviewing not only Toby Emmerich but several other executives who were potential candidates to run the company, which at the time was on the brink of bankruptcy. Ultimately, he withdrew.

Blavatnik’s biggest move in entertainment was his 2011 purchase of Warner Music for $3.3 billion. The company by then was seen as too small to compete, and he was criticized for overpaying. He slashed the labels’ executive salaries out of the gate — improving profitability but losing some talent in the process — and hasn’t spent as much on acquisitions to catch up with the next biggest major record company, Sony Music Entertainment. But WMG is said to be making money as the fortunes of the music industry have turned around.

Blavatnik has repeatedly circled deals for a Hollywood studio — often those that seem to be troubled — and has continued to meet key players, though no major deal has materi­alized. One veteran executive says Blavatnik expressed a strong desire to increase his presence in the U.S. movie business during a 2014 meeting arranged by CAA’s Bryan Lourd.

Blavatnik is a man who likes to entertain at lavish parties, and in the 2014 profile, The New Yorker reported that former Warner Music employees had said Blavatnik wanted “lots of beautiful women at his events, and not too many men.” It noted that he often had been photographed “in one of his signature cream-colored suits, with his arm around the likes of the model Naomi Campbell.”

As Blavatnik has worked his way into the movie business, some of his closest associates have long had malodorous reputations and ultimately were accused of serious sexual misconduct. “His two best friends in Hollywood were Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner,” observes one executive who has done business with Blavatnik. “That’s not a good look, is it?” (Weinstein awaits trial in New York; Ratner has been accused of misconduct by several women but has not been charged with a crime.)

Whatever his connections, Blavatnik seems to have a clear interest in making prestige movies. In 2010, when he struck his pact with The Weinstein Co., Blavatnik was focused on “projects that were upscale and good for his brand,” says an executive who worked with him. (Good for his brand does not mean good for his wallet. In 2017, when The Weinstein Co. was on the brink of collapse in the wake of sexual-assault allegations, Harvey Weinstein suggested to the board that Blavatnik was a potential buyer. Instead he ended up making a $45 million loan and is now suing to get the money back.)

Perhaps it was through Blavatnik’s visits to the Cannes Film Festival that he met other regulars, including Ratner and future Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (who now wields considerable influence in determining which oligarchs will be subject to sanctions). Both Ratner and Mnuchin frequented Blavatnik’s yacht. In 2013, Ratner founded RatPac Entertainment with Australian billionaire James Packer. (A source says Blavatnik was an investor from the beginning.) Also in 2013, that company partnered with Mnuchin’s Dune Entertainment film financing vehicle to form RatPac-Dune, which then financed Warners’ slate of movies with a few exceptions (such as any films in the J.K. Rowling canon). RatPac-Dune started investing in Warners at a time that the studio hit a cold streak, and sources say it was well underwater when Packer sold his stake in RatPac to Blavatnik — apparently at a deep discount — in April 2017. (Terms were not disclosed.) “Warner Bros. is one of the great Hollywood studios,” Blavatnik said in a statement at the time. “I am delighted to be partnering with Kevin Tsujihara and the studio alongside the unique talent of Brett Ratner. Together we will build on RatPac’s strategic partnership with Warner Bros.”

The delight was short-lived. In November, after the Los Angeles Times reported multiple allegations of misconduct against Ratner (who has denied any wrongdoing), Warners quickly cut ties. RatPac was absorbed into Blavatnik’s Access.

Yet Access Industries continues to occupy RatPac’s old offices — which once belonged to Frank Sinatra — on the Warners lot. “He’s thought of as a Warner Bros. guy, and any big-ticket item there, they say his name as someone who might be part of the financing,” says a top agent.

While many in the industry have severed ties with Ratner, Blavatnik appears to have remained close to him. Earlier this year a high-level source told THR that Blavatnik had informed Ratner that he would continue to pay him — it’s unclear if there was a contractual obligation to do so — but asked that he keep a low profile. Ratner did not. The New York Post ‘s Page Six reported in January that Ratner had made himself very visible at Blavatnik’s hotel in Miami. At Cannes this year he stayed aboard Blavatnik’s yacht.

In recent months, a leading agent says, Blavatnik has appeared to accelerate his efforts to make new deals. In May, he named former ESPN president John Skipper to run streaming sports media firm Perform Group. (Skipper left Disney in December and later acknowledged a cocaine problem that had opened him up to a blackmail attempt.)

Meanwhile Blavatnik is in talks with Luhrmann, who with his wife helped design Blavatnik’s Miami hotel. The move surprises one top agent (not involved in the deal), who says that at this point Luhrmann “can’t control a budget and can’t multitask.” The Australian director’s 2016-17 Netflix series, The Get Down , turned into a wildly over-budget disappointment. He hasn’t directed a film since Great Gatsby in 2013.

“Every financier-distributor with whom he has ever worked, including Fox, Warner Bros. and Netflix, have all sought to continue working with him,” says Luhrmann’s agent Robert Newman. “Regarding the question of multitasking, throughout his career Baz has developed television while writing-directing-producing motion pictures, directed operas while creating advertising campaigns, created plays while designing fashion, overseeing hotels and producing records.”

But clearly Blavatnik’s ambition still burns. He’s taking meetings in Los Angeles this month, according to sources. Whether he can finally establish a truly meaningful presence in Hollywood remains to be seen. Sources say he’s still pursuing other Hollywood properties, though one says that despite Blavatnik’s billions, “He lowballs everybody.”

But at this turbulent moment, one industry insider says, maybe Blavatnik can be a lifeline. “We need money like Len’s in the business. Otherwise all we’re going to be looking at is Netflix and Amazon.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Oct. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe .

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Dylan o’brien recalls “really bad” audition for ‘frozen 2’, san sebastian kicks off star-studded showcase with world premiere of erotic feature ‘emmanuelle’, ‘never let go’ director alexandre aja talks halle berry, ‘crawl 2’ and tarantino’s love of ‘crawl’, ‘apartment 7a’ review: julia garner and dianne wiest star in paramount+’s oddly lethargic companion to ‘rosemary’s baby’, javier bardem gets emotional gushing over wife penélope cruz while accepting san sebastian honor, how to stream ‘i saw the tv glow’ online.

• Manage Account
• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on Pinterest
• + additional share options added
• Share on Reddit
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Whats App
• Send an Email
• Print this article
• Post a Comment
• Share on Tumblr

Music’s Mystery Mogul: Len Blavatnik, Trump and Their Russian Friends

Amid the drumbeat of the probe of Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. election, Blavatnik is on a quest to achieve his stated goal of building a "media platform for the 21st century."

By Kim Masters

Kim Masters

In May 2013, Martin Scorsese went to the Cannes Film Festival — not to be feted but to pitch a project:  Silence , his not-exactly-commercial saga of two priests in 17th century Japan. The director had dinner aboard billionaire Len Blavatnik’s 164-foot yacht, Odessa, named for his birthplace in Ukraine. Scorsese and Blavatnik then headed to a lavish party hosted by Roman Abramovich, a Lithuanian by birth who, like Blavatnik, had made his fortune in post-Soviet Russia.

Abramovich was hosting director Baz Luhrmann, whose  The Great Gatsby  was having its premiere at the festival. One observer was struck by the scene: “Len got to arrive with his prestigious guest and Abramovich was there with his, so it was oligarchs showing their connections.” Now, sources say, Blavatnik is negotiating a major multiplatform deal with Luhrmann, and Warner Bros. plans to make a long-gestating Elvis Presley film with the Australian director, presumably with Blavatnik’s backing.

The use of the O-word would annoy Blavatnik, 61. The press-shy billionaire has long maintained that he’s not an oligarch but a naturalized American citizen who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a young man in 1978. Nonetheless, he has found himself on the radar of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to ABC News. Amid the drumbeat of the probe of Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. election, Blavatnik is on a quest to achieve his stated goal of building a “media platform for the 21st century.”

Trending on Billboard

Jon Platt Exiting Warner/Chappell Music For Top Role At Sony/ATV

Since 2011, Blavatnik has been the owner of Warner Music Group. But so far, like many outsiders who try to stake a claim in Hollywood, getting meaningful and gainful traction there has proved elusive. In the past couple of years,  The Hollywood Reporter  has learned, he’s taken shots at acquiring major stakes in Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures. He’s also been in the somewhat antithetical position of investing in prestige films with players who have later become among the most toxic in Hollywood: Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner. Among the projects he’s backed: Lee Daniels’ The Butler , Mel Gibson’s  Hacksaw Ridge  and, yes, Scorsese’s  Silence . Blavatnik also has extensive entertainment interests in Britain, Israel and Russia.

Until last April, Blavatnik was a financier of Warner Bros.’ film slate, investing in such films as Steven Spielberg’s  Ready Player One ,  It  and  Annabelle: Creation . Despite Blavatnik’s close relationship with studio chairman Toby Emmerich (who stayed on Blavatnik’s yacht during the Venice Film Festival this year), Warners did not renew that deal when it expired at the end of March. The studio declined to comment but sources say going forward with new owner AT&T, Warners will no longer seek out slate deals like the one that ended a few months ago.

Blavatnik’s representatives at his privately held Access Industries did not respond to questions on this or any topic, instead providing a statement: “The poor quality of the reporter’s superficial and biased reporting and use of unnamed sources do not warrant any thoughtful response.”

When there are mountains of money potentially to be tapped, ever-hungry Hollywood doesn’t usually ask too many questions about its provenance. Blavatnik’s associates tell contacts in entertainment that he was educated in the U.S. — which is true if you don’t count elementary school through college. Yes, he made vast sums in Russia (his fortune is estimated at $18.6 billion, according to  Forbes ). But Vladimir Putin? Blavatnik’s reps have said he hasn’t seen the Russian president in almost 20 years.

Ignoring the Blavatnik origin story may become a little tougher, however, as he is one of several U.S. citizens with deep foreign ties who have attracted Mueller’s attention by donating millions to GOP causes in the past few years. Foreigners are not permitted to make such donations, but as American citizens, billionaires like Blavatnik can. Among the checks that Blavatnik has written through Access is a $1 million contribution to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, which raised a record-setting $106.7 million (more than double the previous record set by Barack Obama, though Trump’s event involved a smaller staff and fewer events). What became of all that money remains a mystery.

Starting in the 2015-16 election season, Blavatnik’s political contributions “soared and made a hard right turn,” according to an analysis by business professor Ruth May in  The Dallas Morning News . In that cycle, he contributed $6.35 million to Republican candidates and incumbent senators. The biggest beneficiary was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose Senate Leadership Fund received a $2.5 million donation followed by another $1 million in 2017. Blavatnik or Access gave generously to PACs associated with Sen. Lindsey Graham ($800,000) and to Sen. Marco Rubio ($1.5 million).

No. 8: Len Blavatnik | Power 100

Married with four children, Blavatnik owns or has investments in an assortment of industries around the world: natural resources and chemicals, venture capital and real estate. He owns or has stakes in upscale hotels including the Sunset Tower in West Hollywood, the Faena Hotel Miami Beach and the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat on the Cote d’Azur.

At a glance, Blavatnik not only is a wildly successful businessman but a philanthropist who has made huge donations to uni­versities, including $117 million to Oxford (the university’s School of Government building, completed in 2015, bears his name). Oxford’s press release announcing the gift obligingly described Blavatnik as an “American industrialist and philanthropist.” That gift drew protests from a group of more than 20 critics, including academics and activists, who argued that Oxford should “stop selling its reputation and prestige to Putin’s associates.” The university responded that it has “a thorough and robust scrutiny process in place with regard to philanthropic giving,” and a spokesperson for Blavatnik’s foundation said it is focused on supporting “institutions with a track record of significant advancements in science, business and government, regardless of geographic location.” Blavatnik also has given to Harvard ($50 million) and Yale ($10 million), as well as to think tanks and other causes.

Born in Ukraine in 1957, Blavatnik spent most of his childhood in a provincial Russian town. In his teens he studied at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. The family immigrated to the U.S. when he was 21, settling in Brooklyn. He earned a master’s in computer science at Columbia University and worked in the IT department at Macy’s and at the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. He became a citizen in 1984. A couple of years later, he started Access Industries, and three years after that, he got an MBA from Harvard.

After earning his degree, he teamed up with an old classmate from the Moscow Institute: Viktor Vekselberg.  The New York Times  reported in May that agents for Mueller had detained Vekselberg, 61, when he arrived in New York earlier this year. Vekselberg attended Trump’s inauguration and the  Times  reported that Mueller’s interest in him “suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.” Vekselberg was present at a 2015 dinner in Russia at which Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was seated beside Putin. (Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition.)

In April, Vekselberg was among seven oligarchs sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, which cited Russia’s “malign activity around the globe.” His name arose again in May when lawyer Michael Avenatti alleged that a U.S. company controlled by Vekselberg and his cousin had put $500,000 into the same account that Trump associate Michael Cohen used to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels. An attorney for the company said at the time that it is controlled by Americans and that it had retained Cohen “regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.”

As Music Industry's Fortunes Rise, So Do Warner Music Group's Executive Payouts

Unlike Blavatnik, Vekselberg is considered to have maintained close ties to the Kremlin. For a time he and Blavatnik seemed to be working in tandem to establish themselves in influential Washington circles. As reported in a 2014  New Yorker  profile, in 2004 Vekselberg bought nine jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs from the Forbes family for more than $100 million and gifted them to Russia, which was viewed as a way to curry favor with Putin. In 2006, the Kennan Institute — a division of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where Blavatnik was a donor and official fundraiser — gave Vekselberg the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. After some pushback, the award was rescinded, according to  The New Yorker . But the following year, the institute gave Vekselberg a public-service award. The same year, Blavatnik’s Access donated $50,000.

The sources of Blavatnik’s wealth aren’t entirely clear, but he and Vekselberg made a lot of money in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the “aluminum wars” (which pitted organized crime against Russian and foreign investors) and in oil. In the course of acquiring one takeover target in 2001, it was alleged in a lawsuit that militia members representing Blavatnik and his partners forced their way into the company’s offices dressed in fatigues and carrying guns. Blavatnik’s reps have denied this.

Blavatnik and Vekselberg have partnered with others now of interest to Mueller, including sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who paid and loaned millions to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Mikhail Fridman, head of the Alfa Group investment consortium. As noted in a 2005 court ruling, Fridman has been the subject of various “allegations of corruption and illegal conduct.” Fridman and his associate German Khan are the subject of one of the memoranda comprising the Steele dossier, which raised alarms about a possible Trump campaign conspiracy with the Russian government. But there are no allegations of impropriety with respect to these figures’ partnerships with Blavatnik and Vekselberg.

A key asset that Blavatnik brought to his partnerships was his American citizenship. He had Western connections and conveyed a sense of legitimacy lacking in some of his Russian allies. “He’s been able to walk this fine line between these two worlds,” says Diana Pilipenko, an anti-corruption expert at the Center for American Progress. “If he has, in fact, had any concerns about his reputation as a ‘Russian oligarch,’ one can see that he has gone to great lengths to launder it through philanthropy.”

In the mid-2000s, Blavatnik shifted away from the U.S. to spend more time in Britain, where he also has citizenship. He has a 13-bedroom London mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, home of some of the most expensive properties in the world. (Roman Abramovich is a neighbor.) He has amassed a serious art collection. Having hired retired diplomat Sir Michael Pakenham to advise him on how to comport himself in England, he made major contributions to the Royal Academy, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery, as well as Oxford. Last year, he was knighted by the Queen.

Blavatnik owns multiple New York properties (though  The New Yorker  reported that one Manhattan co-op had turned him down, possibly because he had shown up at the interview with armed bodyguards). In 2015 he bought New York Jets owner Woody Johnson’s co-op for a record-setting $77.5 million and this year paid a record $90 million for a New York City mansion, according to reports.

Following the purchase of the U.K. operations of Mel Gibson’s Icon Group in 2009, Blavatnik seemed to start exploring deeper moves into the U.S. entertainment business. He considered a $75 million investment in Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor but decided against it. The following year, he made a run at MGM, interviewing not only Toby Emmerich but several other executives who were potential candidates to run the company, which at the time was on the brink of bankruptcy. Ultimately, he withdrew.

As Harvey Weinstein Falls, the Music Business Buttons Up Corporate Policies

Blavatnik’s biggest move in entertainment was his 2011 purchase of Warner Music for $3.3 billion. The company by then was seen as too small to compete, and he was criticized for overpaying. He slashed the labels’ executive salaries out of the gate — improving profitability but losing some talent in the process — and hasn’t spent as much on acquisitions to catch up with the next biggest major record company, Sony Music Entertainment. But WMG is said to be making money as the fortunes of the music industry have turned around.

Blavatnik has repeatedly circled deals for a Hollywood studio — often those that seem to be troubled — and has continued to meet key players, though no major deal has materi­alized. One veteran executive says Blavatnik expressed a strong desire to increase his presence in the U.S. movie business during a 2014 meeting arranged by CAA’s Bryan Lourd.

Blavatnik is a man who likes to entertain at lavish parties, and in the 2014 profile,  The New Yorker  reported that former Warner Music employees had said Blavatnik wanted “lots of beautiful women at his events, and not too many men.” It noted that he often had been photographed “in one of his signature cream-colored suits, with his arm around the likes of the model Naomi Campbell.”

As Blavatnik has worked his way into the movie business, some of his closest associates have long had malodorous reputations and ultimately were accused of serious sexual misconduct. “His two best friends in Hollywood were Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner,” observes one executive who has done business with Blavatnik. “That’s not a good look, is it?” (Weinstein awaits trial in New York; Ratner has been accused of misconduct by several women but has not been charged with a crime.)

Whatever his connections, Blavatnik seems to have a clear interest in making prestige movies. In 2010, when he struck his pact with The Weinstein Co., Blavatnik was focused on “projects that were upscale and good for his brand,” says an executive who worked with him. (Good for his brand does not mean good for his wallet. In 2017, when The Weinstein Co. was on the brink of collapse in the wake of sexual-assault allegations, Harvey Weinstein suggested to the board that Blavatnik was a potential buyer. Instead he ended up making a $45 million loan and is now suing to get the money back.)

Perhaps it was through Blavatnik’s visits to the Cannes Film Festival that he met other regulars, including Ratner and future Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (who now wields considerable influence in determining which oligarchs will be subject to sanctions). Both Ratner and Mnuchin frequented Blavatnik’s yacht. In 2013, Ratner founded RatPac Entertainment with Australian billionaire James Packer. (A source says Blavatnik was an investor from the beginning.) Also in 2013, that company partnered with Mnuchin’s Dune Entertainment film financing vehicle to form RatPac-Dune, which then financed Warners’ slate of movies with a few exceptions (such as any films in the J.K. Rowling canon).

RatPac-Dune started investing in Warners at a time that the studio hit a cold streak, and sources say it was well underwater when Packer sold his stake in RatPac to Blavatnik — apparently at a deep discount — in April 2017. (Terms were not disclosed.) “Warner Bros. is one of the great Hollywood studios,” Blavatnik said in a statement at the time. “I am delighted to be partnering with Kevin Tsujihara and the studio alongside the unique talent of Brett Ratner. Together we will build on RatPac’s strategic partnership with Warner Bros.”

Warner Music Announces WMG Boost, An Investment Fund for Start-Ups

The delight was short-lived. In November, after the  Los Angeles Times  reported multiple allegations of misconduct against Ratner (who has denied any wrongdoing), Warners quickly cut ties. RatPac was absorbed into Blavatnik’s Access.

Yet Access Industries continues to occupy RatPac’s old offices — which once belonged to Frank Sinatra — on the Warners lot. “He’s thought of as a Warner Bros. guy, and any big-ticket item there, they say his name as someone who might be part of the financing,” says a top agent.

While many in the industry have severed ties with Ratner, Blavatnik appears to have remained close to him. Earlier this year a high-level source told  THR  that Blavatnik had informed Ratner that he would continue to pay him — it’s unclear if there was a contractual obligation to do so — but asked that he keep a low profile. Ratner did not. The New York Post ‘s Page Six reported in January that Ratner had made himself very visible at Blavatnik’s hotel in Miami. At Cannes this year he stayed aboard Blavatnik’s yacht.

In recent months, a leading agent says, Blavatnik has appeared to accelerate his efforts to make new deals. In May, he named former ESPN president John Skipper to run streaming sports media firm Perform Group. (Skipper left Disney in December and later acknowledged a cocaine problem that had opened him up to a blackmail attempt.)

Meanwhile Blavatnik is in talks with Luhrmann, who with his wife helped design Blavatnik’s Miami hotel. The move surprises one top agent (not involved in the deal), who says that at this point Luhrmann “can’t control a budget and can’t multitask.” The Australian director’s 2016-17 Netflix series,  The Get Down , turned into a wildly over-budget disappointment. He hasn’t directed a film since  Great Gatsby  in 2013.

“Every financier-distributor with whom he has ever worked, including Fox, Warner Bros. and Netflix, have all sought to continue working with him,” says Luhrmann’s agent Robert Newman. “Regarding the question of multitasking, throughout his career Baz has developed television while writing-directing-producing motion pictures, directed operas while creating advertising campaigns, created plays while designing fashion, overseeing hotels and producing records.”

But clearly Blavatnik’s ambition still burns. He’s taking meetings in Los Angeles this month, according to sources. Whether he can finally establish a truly meaningful presence in Hollywood remains to be seen. Sources say he’s still pursuing other Hollywood properties, though one says that despite Blavatnik’s billions, “He lowballs everybody.”

Warner Music Group to Acquire German Merch Specialist EMP

But at this turbulent moment, one industry insider says, maybe Blavatnik can be a lifeline. “We need money like Len’s in the business. Otherwise all we’re going to be looking at is Netflix and Amazon.”

This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter .

Daily newsletters straight to your inbox

More From Pro

Spotify, Warner Music, Live Nation Lead Music Stocks to New High

• By Glenn Peoples

Universal Music Group’s Capital Markets Day Hit the Right Notes, Analysts Say

How RCA Racked Up Alternative Radio Success With Cage The Elephant & Myles Smith

Michael Jackson Estate Takes Legal Action Over Abuse Accuser’s Demands For $213M: Reports

• By Bill Donahue

In Canada: Juno Awards Backtrack on Dropping Reggae and Gospel Following Widespread Criticism

• By Rosie Long Decter , Richard Trapunski , Kerry Doole

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

optional screen reader

Charts expand charts menu.

• Billboard Hot 100™
• Billboard 200™
• Hits Of The World™
• TikTok Billboard Top 50
• Songs Of The Summer
• Song Breaker
• Year-End Charts
• Decade-End Charts

Music Expand music menu

• R&B/Hip-Hop

Videos Expand videos menu

Culture expand culture menu, media expand media menu, business expand business menu.

• Business News
• Record Labels
• View All Pro

Pro Tools Expand pro-tools menu

• Songwriters & Producers
• Artist Index
• Royalty Calculator
• Market Watch
• Industry Events Calendar

Billboard Español Expand billboard-espanol menu

• Cultura y Entretenimiento

Get Up Anthems by Tres Expand get-up-anthems-by-tres menu

Honda music expand honda-music menu.

Joss Stone and Naomie Harris at a lunch hosted by Blavatnik and Harvey Weinstein

His fortune is pegged at around $17 billion, and he has made the bulk of his money in the US and the former Soviet Union.

Should you seek monuments to the “back-up aerodrome” maxim, there is the $30m of scientific scholarships in New York, millions donated over the years to British institutions including the Tate Modern, National Gallery and the Royal Academy. Most munificent of all is the bold headquarters of the Blavatnik School of Government, inching upwards into the Oxford skyline, thanks to a whopping $128 million endowment.

Blavatnik lets his billions speak for themselves. He prefers to pay the expensive PR outfit Brunswick to buff his reputation for him. But there is another Russian saying: that you never ask an oligarch how he made his first million.

Though he is an American citizen and has a sensational Manhattan apartment, he finds London a congenial base this side of the Atlantic. So in 2004 he bought the ultimate billionaire’s retreat, 15 Kensington Palace Gardens. He outbid his oligarch rival Roman Abramovich by spending what was then considered a preposterous $70 million on the 13- bedroom Italianate mansion. He has since sunk millions more into the house, creating underground parking with a car lift, cinema, and what was believed to be London’s only hybrid indoor/outdoor swimming pool at the time.

Blavatnik’s social life is varied. His close circle in London includes Sir Ronald Cohen and Jacob Rothschild. He also likes to throw his London and New York homes open to a wider circle of glamorous young people — actors and musicians, as well as writers such as Simon Sebag Montefiore and Andrew Roberts.

Lord George Weidenfeld, who attended his 50th birthday party on the French Riviera at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, says despite these extravagant parties, Blavatnik is a modest man who is accumulating an important 20th century art collection: “If anything, he plays down his wealth.”

“Len Blavatnik was very shrewd,” says Andrew Langton, chairman of Aylesford International, who acted on the property deal. “He realised there was a wave of very rich individuals coming to London from the East who would want to buy up properties that had been used as embassies and he got in early.”

In 2011 he acquired Warner Music in the US and entered a new world of celebrity performers and their hangers-on. His party aboard his 164ft yacht, Odessa — relatively modest by the standards of his oligarch peers — is an annual highlight of the Cannes lm festival. Joss Stone, signed to Warner, has performed on-board to the delight of Blavatnik and his friends.

A week after paying $3.3 billion for Warner Music, Blavatnik pulled his yacht into Cannes’ old port. Aboard was his normal retinue, plus some of his Hollywood friends, including Jane Fonda, Melanie Griffith and Sarah Jessica Parker. As the champagne flowed, Mick Jagger pulled up alongside with friends in tow and wondered if they might come aboard to join the fun. Blavatnik turned him away.

He also has Sir Michael Pakenham, a retired diplomat and the third son of the late 7th Earl of Longford, on his payroll to advise him on English manners and ethics. Should you be invited onto Blavatnik’s yacht, by all means refer to him as a tycoon or philanthropist, but do not call him a Russian oligarch, for he hates the guilt by association.

Blavatnik with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin

He has a point, in that he is not Russian, but was born in Odessa, in Ukraine, in 1957. As a boy, Blavatnik was not exactly poor, but money was tight in the family home headed by two academics. Being Jewish held him back when his family moved to a small town outside Moscow. As a result, though precociously bright, he was barred from admission to prestigious Russian universities — where strict Jewish quotas applied — and ended up studying at the unglamorous Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers.

His life-changing stroke of luck was that his coming of age coincided with a loosening in the Soviet Union’s attitude to Jewish emigration. In 1978, when he was 21, his family left for America and like many new arrivals settled in Brooklyn. Blavatnik attended Columbia University, then Harvard Business School. He is far better educated than most oligarchs and more westernised. He took US citizenship and now speaks impeccable English with a light accent sprinkled with American phrases and intonation.

While studying at Harvard in 1986, Blavatnik set up an investment company, Access Industries, working through the night in the kitchen of his tiny Brooklyn apartment. The really big opportunities opened up back home in the Nineties during Boris Yeltsin’s botched privatisation programme. With a Russian partner, Blavatnik began buying up aluminium plants at knockdown prices and became a leading player in the Russian market. Next, he diversified into coal, making a huge profit on a coalfield in Kazakhstan.

Then he moved into oil via a company known as TNK, which was soon embroiled in a gruelling legal and political battle with BP for control of another oil company, Chernogorneft.

For the past few years, Blavatnik has been moving away from the traditional oligarch’s sources of wealth, energy and aluminium. He is now a new digital content empire. Hence his purchase of Warner Music and investment in web-based music streaming companies, including Spotify and France’s Deezer. Since the purchase of Warner, he has acquired Parlophone and artists such as Pink Floyd and Coldplay.

But there is no concealing the fact that his wealth was accumulated in often dirty fights in the former Soviet Union, by buying up assets at rock-bottom prices, in an era when some of his associates were prepared to sail close to the wind. Some, therefore, question the wisdom and morality of Oxford University accepting $128 million from him for its school of government.

“Blavatnik wants his name to stand in comparison to Kennedy’s [which adorns the equivalent school at Harvard], but, really, this is simple reputation shopping,” says Ilya Zaslavskiy, who worked for TNK-BP and is now a fellow at Chatham House in London.

Such concerns are dismissed by Professor Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School. Woods says Oxford has grown over nine centuries into a world-class institution through vast private benefactions like this. “We carry the name of Blavatnik with pride,” she says. “Len Blavatnik has stepped up to the plate and said we are going to improve governance with a huge philanthropic gift.”

She describes him as “extraordinarily clever” and blessed with the American immigrant’s drive. Yet, as others have noted, she says Blavatnik is calm in person, almost humble. “He is a natural global citizen. He gets the importance of good governance across the world.”

Blavatnik with former US President Bill Clinton

It is sometimes difficult to square this assessment with Blavatnik’s past, but several people — not all beneficiaries of his largesse — said the same of him. It is certainly true that the school reflects its founder’s internationalism, and though Oxford will be proud of its new addition, it will not initially be of much benefit to British students. Of this year’s intake of 63 graduate students, only three or four are British.

The school is constitutionally a university department and Blavatnik would not be able to influence its operations even if he wanted to. But Woods says he is very engaged with the students when he comes to Oxford, and speaks to them individually and at length. Perhaps Blavatnik should be seen in the grand tradition of adventurers with ambiguous backstories, men who eventually need to do good.

Blavatnik’s activities in Britain illustrate vividly how the vast inflows of international money have upended established practice. Money, influence and patronage are linked via elaborate networks of shifting alliances.

Through Access Industries (UK), Blavatnik has given $58,650 to the Conservative Party. Bill Clinton and Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, adorn the Blavatnik School of Government’s international advisory board. Meanwhile, Blavatnik is a generous donor to the Tate, which said it does not discuss individual donors.

Could it be an exchange of money for influence, of vast wealth for respectability? For perhaps, were anything disobliging ever to turn up about Blavatnik’s past or present, the embarrassment would not be strictly personal, but spread widely around his new best friends in high places. Equally, this billionaire makes a good case for altruism.

Either way, as Melinda Gates, a very different sort of philanthropist, once put it: “Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy”.

Privacy Overview

Latest e-Edition

• The Berkshire Eagle

• Pittsfield, Massachusetts
• 58° Mostly Cloudy

The Twitter feed for the Pittsfield Municipal Airport shared this image of the Boeing 737-700 owned by Len Blavatnik landing in the city on July 13.

• PHOTO PROVIDED BY PITTSFIELD MUNICIPAL AIRPORT

The Twitter feed Russian Oligarch Jets posted about the Pittsfield landing on July 13. 

• TWITTER POST

Len Blavatnik, left, and his spouse, Emily Appelson, arrive at the 60th annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden in 2018. 

• Associated Press file PHOTO

A Boeing 737-700 owned by billionaire Len Blavatnik landed at Pittsfield Municipal Airport at 8:48 a.m. July 13. It took off just a few hours later. The airport itself posted a video of the landing, without identifying that the jet is owned by the world’s 42nd richest person.

A jet owned by one of the world’s richest people stopped in Pittsfield. He asks that you not call him an oligarch

• By Larry Parnass, The Berkshire Eagle
• Jul 31, 2022
• 3 min to read

PITTSFIELD — Quick stop at a dispensary? Catching a show at Tanglewood?

Those were questions posted by followers of a Twitter account, “Russian Oligarch Jets,” after it tracked a jet owned by one of the world’s richest men to a morning landing in Pittsfield.

Along with tweets that were less kind.

A Boeing 737-700 owned by billionaire Len Blavatnik landed at Pittsfield Municipal Airport at 8:48 a.m. on July 13, according to the automated tracker that posts to Twitter. It took off the same day, a Wednesday, just a few hours later.

The Pittsfield airport itself posted a video of the landing, without identifying that the jet is owned by Blavatnik, who Forbes lists at the moment as the world’s 42nd richest person.

“Did you notice the abnormally large aircraft fly over downtown #Pittsfield this morning,” read a post that day from the airport’s Twitter account, #FlyPSF. The tweet identified the jet’s operator as Polaris Aviation.

Born in the 1950s in the Soviet Union, Blavatnik moved to the United States in 1978 at around age 21 after earning a bachelor’s degree at Moscow State University. He became a U.S. citizen in 1984 and holds dual British citizenship. In the U.S., he received a master’s degree in computer science from Columbia University and then an MBA from Harvard University.

Though Blavatnik cut his early ties to Russia, and is not the target of current government sanctions against oligarchs over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he got rich through his association with a man who has been sanctioned. Forbes magazine reports that Blavatnik’s early wealth stemmed from his connection with Viktor Vekselberg and investments in Russian oil and aluminum companies.

Even before the war against Ukraine began this year, a Blavatnik spokesman told Forbes that he is not Russian and has never considered himself Russian. “And is not an oligarch,” the spokesman told the magazine.

His net worth is today calculated to be around $30 billion. Over the years he has given hundreds of millions to charities and schools, including Harvard and Oxford universities. He was knighted in 2017 by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his philanthropy. He is a big contributor to both major U.S. political parties.

Though aviation trips are recorded and public, it isn’t known who was aboard the 737 that landed in Pittsfield, or why it came to the city for just a few hours.

July 13 wasn’t the first time a jet of roughly this size landed in Pittsfield, but it is rare, said Dan Shearer, the airport manager. Jets that come in and out of Pittsfield tend to be mid-sized, like Citations and the Gulfstream IV, he said.

“Although a Boeing 737 is one of the most common aircraft in the world, it is unusual for us because the vast majority of them are used in scheduled, commercial flights,” he said.

The 16-passenger jet, built in 1999 and once owned by the General Electric Co., left Pittsfield just before noon, according to the Russian Oligarch Jets Twitter feed, returning to the New York City area – first to White Plains and then to New York Stewart International Airport, in Newburgh, N.Y.

Blavatnik has a home in the White Plains area, as well as an East Side townhouse and Park Avenue apartment in New York City. His most valuable residence, though, is believed to be his Kensington Palace Garden mansion in London, worth an estimated $250 million.

Did you notice the abnormally large aircraft fly over downtown #Pittsfield this morning. @PolarisAviation landed their beautiful 737-700 BBJ land at PSF. pic.twitter.com/aGw8yIJO9p — Pittsfield Municipal Airport (@FlyPSF) July 13, 2022

The Newburgh airport is listed as the jet’s home base, where it is managed by Polaris Aviation Solutions LLC. The flight tracker shows repeated trips in and out of that airfield.

The timing of the trip to and from Pittsfield did not coincide with performances in that time frame at Berkshires venues – too early even for matinees of “Once” at the Berkshire Theatre Group and “Man of God” at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

The Russian Oligarch Jets Twitter tracker calculates fuel used, fuel costs and CO2 output. The jet’s morning flight July 13 from White Plains to Pittsfield, covering 96 miles, consumed an estimated 406 gallons of fuel at a cost of $2,799. That leg of the trip alone produced four tons of CO2 emissions, according to the tracker.

In the past two months, the Blavatnik jet has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, on trips that took passengers to France and Italy. A July 8 flight from Bordeaux, France, to JFK International Airport consumed $45,435 worth of fuel and produced an estimated 69 tons of CO2 emissions.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average passenger vehicle in the U.S. produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 emissions in a full year, based on 22 miles per gallon and 11,500 miles traveled.

Since visiting Pittsfield, the Blavatnik jet has traveled to Portland, Maine, to an airport in the Hamptons on Long Island and to Nice, France, among other places.

That jet is just one of several Blavatnik owns, according to the website Super Yacht / Fan. He also owns a yacht called Odessa II, named for his home town in Ukraine.

A Forbes profile says Blavatnik took in $7 billion when he sold a stake in a Russian oil company in 2013. His net worth leapt again when he took Warner Music Group public, after acquiring it for $3.3 billion in 2011, and saw its value quadruple.

As of Sunday, Forbes’ “real time” tracker listed Blavatnik’s net worth at $29.8 billion. That’s down $2.7 billion from an earlier figure this year.

The investment company he runs, Access Industries , has ownership interests in LyondellBasell, a chemical company; Rocket Internet, which does e-commerce; and other businesses, including Tory Burch, a fashion company.

Larry Parnass can be reached at [email protected] and 413-588-8341.

• Russian Oligarchs
• Len Blavatnik
• Warner Music Group
• Access Industries
• Polaris Aviation Solutions Llc
• Pittsfield Municipal Airport

• Notifications

Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.

Former hedge fund exec pays $25M for One High Line penthouse 

Robert Shafir previously sold penthouse at 150 Charles Street for $52M

A former hedge fund executive is the latest buyer at Steve Witkoff and Len Blavatnik’s One High Line. 

Robert Shafir and his wife, Donna, bought a penthouse at the Chelsea condo project for $25 million, or roughly $5,200 per square foot, according to public records. 

Shafir previously led Daniel Och’s Sculptor Capital Management and led Credit Suisse’s operations in the Americas. His purchase comes more than a year after he sold his penthouse at 150 Charles Street for $52 million — roughly $20 million more than he paid in 2016. 

Shafir appears to have already been in contract to purchase the half-floor condo at 76 11th Avenue when it hit the market for $30 million in June 2023, according to Streeteasy. PH35A spans 5,800 square feet and has five bedrooms, five bathrooms and views of the Hudson River. 

A spokesperson for the project declined to comment on the deal. 

The Corcoran Group’s Richard Ziegelasch represented Shafir in the purchase and in the sale last year of the penthouse at 150 Charles Street.

Corcoran Sunshine’s Deborah Kern and Steve Gold are heading sales at the 236-unit building, once known as the XI. The development marketing firm replaced Douglas Elliman at the helm of the formerly troubled project and relaunched sales in 2022. 

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

Witkoff Group and Access Industries paid $900 million for the development in December 2021, after HFZ Capital’s financial woes sent the property into foreclosure. Sales at the project were paused two years prior, as turmoil unfolded at the firm led by Ziel Feldman and Nir Meir . Meir is now accused of orchestrating an $86 million fraud scheme. 

Since the rebrand, some of One High Line’s priciest units have snagged signed contracts, including a penthouse last asking $52 million when it landed an inked deal last June. Earlier this year, another penthouse found a buyer after asking $49 million .

The developers said the project was the top-selling new development in Manhattan in the first half of the year, with sales totaling about $800 million. 

Last month, Witkoff and Blavatnik scored $1.15 billion to refinance the project from JP Morgan and Tyko Capital, marking one of the largest single-asset loans of 2024.

Amenities in the two-tower building include a lap pool, jacuzzi, fitness center, golf simulator and on-site parking. Buyers also have access to services at the project’s planned Faena Hotel. 

This article has been updated to include broker information in the One High Line purchase and 150 Charles Street sale.

Companies and People