Vladimir Litvinenko

Vladimir Stefanovich Litvinenko (Russian: Влади́мир Стефа́нович Литвине́нко, born 14 August 1955) is a Russian academic, businessman and Vladimir Putin's campaign manager. He is also rector of the National Mineral Resources University in St. Petersburg.

Career

Litvinenko has been the rector of the National Mineral Resources University since the 1990s. He oversaw Vladimir Putin's dissertation work in 1996, which is alleged to include significant amounts of plagiarism and is speculated perhaps to have not even been written by Putin (i.e. that he paid somebody to write it for him). Litvinenko has been criticised for not spotting the plagiarism. According to his daughter Olga, Vladimir Litvinenko himself wrote the dissertation.

Litvinenko was Putin's political campaign manager in 2000 and 2004.

On June 11, 2014, he was given an honorary doctorate by the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Saxony, Germany.

Business career

Litvinenko owns nearly 15% of PhosAgro, a phosphate mining company in the Arctic. The mine had been at one time partly owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He claims that he was paid in shares for some consulting that he did in 2004 and that this "did not contradict any laws".

Phosagro was floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 2011 and Litvinenko was listed among its new owners, as chairman. When Litvinenko owned 5%, the stock was worth about $260 million. In April 2014, he acquired a further 4.9% from Andrey Guryev, who controls the company, for $269 million.

Personal life

Litvinenko has a daughter, Olga, born in 1983, who used to be a member of the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg. In May 2010 Vladimir and his wife were looking after Olga's daughter Ester-Maria Litvinenko (born in 2009), and refused to give her back to Olga. Olga has described this as a kidnapping and has instigated legal proceedings to get her daughter back. Olga describes her father as "the richest rector in Russia" and an "oligarch" ("самый богатый ректор России, олигарх"). In summer 2011, Vladimir reported to the police that Olga and her other son, Mikhail, had been kidnapped and his daughter's assets were frozen.