Russia’s richest oligarchs have lost nearly $95 billion this year due to tough Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine, losing $330 million a day since the Kremlin’s incursion began, with Roman Abramovich, the former owner of British soccer club Chelsea, the biggest loser, according to the Guardian newspaper quoted by News.ro.

Roman AbramovichPhoto: Sergey Karpukhin / Sputnik / Profimedia Images

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Roman Abramovich’s fortune has fallen by 57 percent this year to $7.8 billion. Abramovich was one of the first oligarchs to come under British sanctions after the government in London accused him of having “clear links” to Vladimir Putin’s regime and belonging to a group of Russian businessmen who “stained their hands with blood”.

Another Russian oligarch, Gennadiy Tymchenko, an energy investor who is a close friend of Putin, saw his wealth drop 48% to $11.8 billion, while Suleiman Kerimov, another associate of the Kremlin leader, lost 41% of his wealth. fell to $9 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.

The British government has frozen the assets of Russian oligarchs and other citizens worth more than 18 billion pounds. Sanctions were imposed against 1,271 people, including Abramovich and the “nickel king” Volodymyr Potanin, the second richest man in Russia.

In total, in 2022, 23 Russian rich people, who are tracked by Bloomberg’s daily updated list, lost about 95 billion dollars.

However, their losses pale in comparison to those suffered by America’s tech billionaires this year. Elon Musk’s fortune fell by nearly 50% to $138 billion after a significant drop in the value of shares in his electric car company Tesla. In December, he lost his status as the world’s richest man to Frenchman Bernard Arnault, the majority owner and CEO of luxury goods group LVMH.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, saw his fortune drop by 65% ​​to $45 billion after the value of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, collapsed. It fell 19 places in the Bloomberg index to end 2022 at No. 25, its weakest position since 2014.

In total, the 500 richest people in the world in 2022 lost almost 1.4 trillion dollars.

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