MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska said Western investors should not be pressured to sell their Russian assets. According to him, this practice is dishonest, short-sighted and harmful to the Russian and global economy.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many Western companies have left Russia, with some of their assets placed under state control and allies of President Vladimir Putin given day-to-day control.
Some Western investors who remain in Russia say they have been pressured to sell, offered cut prices and threatened with virtual expropriation.
“Pushing foreign companies to sell their Russian assets is dishonest, short-sighted and extremely harmful for the economy – not only the global one, but also the Russian one,” the Russian edition of Forbes magazine quotes Deripaska as saying. This was reported by Deripaska’s representative.
“It is important that the few Western investors who are still operating in Russia remain owners of their enterprises and are able to survive these difficult times.”
In Russia’s war economy, some businessmen became billionaires by purchasing major assets of Western companies at extremely discounted prices.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Deripaska himself came under British sanctions for alleged ties to Putin. He has filed a lawsuit against the sanctions, which he says are based on false information and flagrantly violate basic principles of law and justice.
Deripaska, who studied physics at Moscow University, turned to metals trading after the collapse of the Soviet Union and made a fortune buying shares in aluminum smelters. Forbes estimated his net worth this year at $2.8 billion.
He founded Basic Element, an industrial group with interests in mining, energy, real estate and agriculture, out of his company Siberian Aluminum, which gained control of some of the crown jewels of the post-Soviet aluminum sector.
Deripaska called for peace in Ukraine in 2022 and called the war a tragedy for both the Russian and Ukrainian people.
Deripaska has also been sanctioned by the US, which took action against him and other powerful Russians in 2018, saying they were profiting from the Russian state engaging in “malicious activities” around the world.
The sanctions, an attempt to punish Moscow for alleged interference in the 2016 US elections, were “groundless, ridiculous and absurd,” Deripaska said at the time.