New ranking of richest Ukrainians shows Poroshenko getting richer

While the order of the very top names on the list hasn’t changed much since the 2014 ranking, the fortunes of the most have decreased. The fortunes are estimated in dollars, while the Ukrainian national currency hryvnia has lost 45 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar since the 2014 ranking.

Poroshenko is the only businessman in the Top 10 who has increased his fortune in the past year.

The full ranking of the 100 richest Ukrainians is available in the print issue #40 of Novoye Vremya magazine.

The 2015 ranking of the richest is topped — as it is habitually — by Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of SCM Group that has assets in metallurgy, energy, and media. Akhmetov also owns Shakhtar football club.

Novoye Vremya estimated Akhmetov’s fortune as $4.5 billion, marking a 56 percent decline since 2014, when the businessman was worth over $10 billion. It was still far from Akhmetov’s best year, 2012, when his estimated net worth was $18.6 billion.

Akhmetov has been topping the rankings of the richest Ukrainians since 2006 when the first ranking like that was published by Kyiv Post and Korrespondent magazine. In 2008, he was the richest man in Europe. He got hit badly with the crisis and the following war in Ukraine’s eastern regions, where SCM Group owns many enterprises.

Akhmetov is followed by Ihor Kolomoisky ($1.9 billion) and Hennadiy Bogoliubov ($1.8 billion), the partners who own Ukraine’s biggest bank Privatbank as well as metallurgy and oil enterprises. In 2014, the partners’ estimated net worth was $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion, respectively.

Another metallurgy tycoon Viktor Pinchuk is on the fifth position in the ranking with $1.6 billion. He showed a modest decline, losing just 16 percent of his 2014 fortune of $1.9 billion. Apart from the metallurgy, Pinchuk has assets in media, including ICTV channel, and funds ANTIAIDS Foundation and Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv, both run by his wife Olena Pinchuk, a daughter of Ukraine’s former President Leonid Kuchma.

Pinchuk is followed by Dmytro Firtash with $1 billion. Firtash is Ukraine’s oligarch in exile. Since early 2015 he has been living in Vienna, where he was detained by the request of FBI in March. The Austrian court refused his extradition to U.S. In Ukraine, the state is suing Firtash’s chemical holding Ostchem for Hr 5.7 billion.

President Poroshenko occupies the sixth position in the ranking, but he is its most remarkable participant. While his fellow millionaires and billionaires are losing money, his net worth has grown 20 percent in one year, marking $979 million, and lifting him from the ninth to the sixth position in the ranking. Poroshenko’s main asset is Roshen, Ukraine’s largest confectionery corporation. He also owns Channel 5.

During his 2014 presidential campaign, Poroshenko promised to sell Roshen, when elected president. He failed to fulfill the promise so far.

Oleksandr and Halyna Hereha are the only new names in the Top 10 part of the ranking. The husband and wife run Epicenter, Ukraine’s biggest chain of DIY stores. They occupied 12th position in the 2014 ranking. They moved three positions up the ranking even though their net worth decreased by $105 million.