Working for a Russian oligarch

In 2012, in my final year in Russia, I was hired as CEO of Organic, a start-up company developing organic farming. It had a few crop and vegetable farms outside of Moscow, a milk factory, a retail store, and was developing e-commerce.

The job came through a headhunter. Before it I had worked for my family business that was also in food production, so Organic seemed a fitting opportunity. The company belonged to Nikolay Zvetkov, a Russian billionaire oligarch who in the 1990s had made most of his money from the oil business. Zvetkov had also built a large bank, UralSib, and financed a number of small projects, such as Organic, that were essentially his hobbies.

For the uninitiated, here is a brief note on Russian oligarchs.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the transition to the market economy, under Russia’s first president Yeltsin, wasn’t easy (an understatement!). The government was bankrupt; it printed money and raised funds through privatizations, by selling state-owned assets at dirt cheap prices to the so-called insiders — managers or savvy financiers. So the ownership of oil fields and Soviet-era factories in different industries got transferred to private individuals. These private individuals in return supported Yeltsin and his family. This “partnership” was crony capitalism or outright corruption. But it was also needed to mitigate the risk of Yeltsin losing to communists and the country going back to the old regime.