Mikhail Fridman

Mikhail Fridman is Chairman of LetterOne, the privately owned international investment business, headquartered in Luxembourg. Mikhail was born in Lvov, Ukraine on 21 April 1964. He graduated from school in Lvov in 1980, where he won school Olympiads in physics and mathematics. He won a place at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys and graduated with honours in 1986. He started as an entrepreneur in 1988, establishing Courier, a window-washing business, with a group of friends from University, where they employed students from different Moscow universities. Together with several partners he founded the Alfa Group Consortium in 1989, primarily focusing on computer trading and copy machine maintenance, expanding into imports and exports, trading commodities and importing consumer goods. Alfa-Bank was established in December 1990, and grew to be one of the largest private banks in Russia today. In 1997, Alfa Group Consortium together with Access Industries/Renova Group acquired the TNK Oil Company. In 2003, Alfa Group and its partners completed a deal with BP to form the 50/50 TNK–BP joint venture. Mikhail served as a CEO of TNK-BP until July 2012, when it was sold to Rosneft for 56 billion USD. L1 was established in 2013 to invest internationally in energy, telecoms and technology, and health.