Arkady Rotenberg
Quick Facts
Biography
Arkady Romanovitch Rotenberg (Russian: Аркадий Романович Ротенберг, born December 15, 1951 in Leningrad) is a Russian businessman and oligarch. He is co-owner (with his brother Boris Rotenberg) of the SGM (Stroygazmontazh) group, the largest construction company for gas pipelines and electrical power supply lines in Russia.
He was listed by Forbes in 621st place among the world's wealthiest persons in 2014. He is considered a close confidant of president Vladimir Putin. As of January 2016, Forbes estimates his fortune at $1.26 billion. He is subject to personal sanctions by the US government related to the events during the Ukrainian crisis.
Biography
Rotenberg is of Jewish ancestry. In 2001, he and his brother founded the SMP bank, which operates in 40 Russian cities with over 100 branches, more than half of them in the Moscow area. SMP oversees the operation of more than 900 ATM-machines.
Rotenberg is the president of the Hockey Club Dynamo Moscow. In 2013 he became a member of the committee of the International Judo Federation.
In 2013 Rotenberg became the chairman of the Enlightenment Publishing House
, which had once been the biggest supplier for textbooks in the Soviet Union. After Enlightenment became a private company in 2011, the government of the Russian Federation started to make several changes in that sector. In 2013 an internal council was formed by the Ministry of Education to check all textbooks. Many of Enlightenments competitors books did not pass this new evaluation and so Enlightenment won about 70% of the contracts for new textbooks in the Russian Federation in 2014.When Italy, based on the sanctions, seized property of Rotenberg, the Russian Federation issued a new Law, allowing Russians, hit by sanctions, to get compensated by the state. The law is known as "Rotenberg Law".
Rotenberg was named in the Panama Papers.
Sanctions
As a result of the 2014 Crimean crisis, the federal government of the United States under Barack Obama blacklisted the Rotenberg brothers and other close friends of the Russian president, including Sergei Ivanov and Gennadi Timchenko.