Rinat Akhmetov

An international business leader from the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov has found success in market sectors that range from mining and power generation to investment banking and insurance. He has been the president of System Capital Management since founding this diversified financial and industrial group in 2000. With an estimated net worth of 4.3 billion, he ranked 687^th on Forbes magazine’s World Billionaires list.

Rinat Akhmetov
Akhmetov_Rinat_Leonidovich.jpg Akhmetov_Rinat_Leonidovich.jpg Rinat Akhmetov
Born	1966/09/21 Donetsk, Ukraine
🏳️ Nationality	Ukrainian
Other names	Rinat Achmetow
🎓 Alma mater	Donetsk National University
💼 Occupation	Founder, System Capital Management
🏢 Organization	Rinat Akhmetov Foundation
🌐 Website	https://akhmetovfoundation.org/en

Early Life

Rinat Akhmetov was born in 1966 to a family of modest means in Donetsk, Ukraine. His father was a coal miner, and his mother was a shop assistant.

By the time he decided to pursue a formal college education, Rinat Akhmetov had already established himself as a leading Ukrainian businessman. He studied economics at Donetsk National University and earned his bachelor’s degree in 2001.

Career

Embarking on his business career in the late 1980s, Rinat Akhmetov found initial success in the coal and coke trade before expanding into a range of alternative investments. “I have earned my first million by trading coal and coke and spent the money on assets that no one wanted to buy,” he said. “It was a risk, but it was worth it.”

A passionate football fan, Rinat Akhmetov has been the sole owner and President of Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk since 1996. Over the years, he has led this football club to several Ukrainian Premier League titles as well as a Ukrainian Cup title.

Rinat Akhmetov founded System Capital Management (SCM) in 2000 and quickly built it into the biggest financial and industrial holding company in Ukraine. Under his leadership, the SCM portfolio currently includes more than 500 companies that employ roughly 200,000 people in a broad spectrum of sectors and industries.

Philanthropy

“I have always been engaged in charitable giving,” said Rinat Akhmetov. “For me, charity is, first of all, the ability to feel someone else’s pain. It means openness and, of course, commitment to delivering results.”

In addition to his long history of funding other philanthropic organizations, Rinat Akhmetov spearheads his own charitable initiatives through the Foundation for Development of Ukraine. He established this organization as a nonprofit arm of SCM in 2005 with a specific focus on aiding people in the Donetsk, Donbass, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.

In addition to providing a range of social services through its central Humanitarian Centre in Donetsk, the Foundation for Development of Ukraine delivers emergency food supplies to civilian victims of military action within Ukraine. In the Donbass region alone, it has given needy children more than 10 million individual meal packages.

The Foundation for Development of Ukraine also responded rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Beginning with an initial contribution of more than $8 million in US dollars, the organization funded the Ukrainian Ministry of Health purchase of ventilators and other critical hospital equipment as well as PPE (personal protective equipment) and rapid testing kits.

Personal Life

Rinat Akhmetov and his wife, Liliya Nikolaievna Smirnova, have two sons. The couple gave birth to their first son, Damir, in 1988 and their second son, Almir.

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