RUSSIA:Russia's latest rich list has just been published. Conor Sweeneyin Moscow gave it the once over
Ireland's new rich are still talking about property prices, but they're well behind Russia's oligarch class when it comes to the vulgar question of money.
Just 15 years after the collapse of communism, Russian magazine Finance has published the names of the 500 wealthiest people in the country.
Whatever about recent talk of a new cold war between the US and Russia, it seems it won't be based on an ideological battle. Money, not Marx, is conquering all in the land of Lenin.
It takes at least €75 million to make the rich list in the first place. The wealthiest man in the country is now Oleg Deripaska(38), who has amassed a fortune worth €16.2 billion, mainly in metals such as aluminium, but he also has interests spanning insurance and pulp, as well as a Russian bus-manufacturing factory. Deripaska's wealth almost doubled in the past year, calculates Finance, surpassing the better-known Roman Abramovich, who comes a close second, with €16.1bn. Abramovich also discovered this weekend that his attempt to resign as governor of Russia's poorest region, Chukotka, has been rejected.
It seems that President Vladimir Putin wants him to keep injecting hundreds of millions of euro of his own money into the region, as he has done for the past four years.
While Abramovich, nicknamed Admiral Chelski because of his taste for both expensive yachts and football clubs, has assets in the UK, Deripaska now controls a major Irish industrial plant. He's a shareholder in newly merged conglomerate Rusal, which includes among its assets the Aughinish Alumina plant in the Shannon estuary.
The make-up of Russia's wealthiest has changed since the 1996 elections, when a small handful of the then richest men in the country helped finance Boris Yeltsin's re-election. At the time, Deripaska was still a student. He only emerged from postgraduate college that year, although he was already building his fortune by trading shares in aluminium companies.
When Putin won his first election in 2000, the influence of a handful of the individuals surrounding Yeltsin was immense. Now many of them are either in jail or in exile.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and one of the coterie surrounding Yeltsin, is now sewing gloves in a Siberian penal camp after he ignored Putin's warning to stay out of politics and pay his taxes. The oil firm he founded, Yukos, has been bankrupted and most of its assets are back in state hands.
Another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, most recently in the headlines because of his close association with poisoned KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, lives in exile in London and is wanted in Russia for fraud and embezzlement.
Unlike these figures, Russia's new elite has avoided confronting the Kremlin. Abramovich, for instance, sold his oil assets to another state-backed energy giant. Deripaska has some links to the ancien regime, through his marriage to Boris Yelstin's daughter. Although he is considered a highly ambitious businessman, he seems likely to avoid getting involved in politics.
"Deripaska's appetite appears far from sated, and he is still capable of rocking the boat - apparently undeterred by the cautionary tale presented by the Yukos affair to all oligarch lobbyists," commented Deutsche Bank UFG.
The third richest man in the country has also hit the international headlines, after his brief detention in France at a ski resort earlier this year. The two metre (6.5ft) tall Mikhail Prokhorov, dubbed Russia's most eligible bachelor, was held in connection with an alleged prostitution ring at the resort of Courcheval, but was released without charge.
In a reworking of F Scott Fitzgerald's quip on the wealthy - "the rich are different from you and me" (to which Ernest Hemingway replied: "Yes, they have more money") - Prokhorov explained his arrest by saying people didn't understand that the rich behaved differently.
In the past few weeks, he has split from his business partner, Vladimir Potanin. Both are valued at €11 billion. They have also benefited from the high global prices for gold and nickel, through their main holdings, Polyus Gold and Norilsk Nickel.
The oldest of the top five is Vladimir Lisin, who has just turned 50. He has made his fortune in the steel industry and, like many of Russia's new rich, has a strong academic background, with doctorates in both engineering and economics.
The most prominent woman on the list in Elena Baturina, who also happens to be the wife of Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov. She is ranked number 17 overall, with her stakes in construction giant Inteko and other assets worth €4.6 bn. Last year, she tried to prevent the publication of an issue of Forbes magazine in Russia which revealed how she had accumulated her wealth.
For most Russians, still struggling to get by on an average salary of just €200 per month, the wealth of this handful of people evokes contempt.
Recently, Putin admitted the biggest failure of his presidency had been his inability to improve the social imbalance between the wealthiest and poorest in the country. However, it is clear that in cities like Moscow and St Petersburg at least some of the wealth is now trickling down to the growing middle classes - foreign car sales continue to rocket and new shopping centres are opening every week.
Yet, in many shops and nightclubs, the prices are way beyond the dreams of most people. For example, membership at a recently opened sauna and keep-fit centre in Moscow comes to €32,000. In some of the most exclusive nightclubs, it costs €1,000 to €4,000 to reserve a table.
But while Bill Gates made his money in software, almost all the wealth among Russia's elite comes from the export of natural resources such as oil, gas, steel, nickel, gold and aluminium.
"If we were to look at the main pattern of the oligarchs' concentration, it's mainly in the extraction sector. This is not something to be surprised at. If you look at exports, two-thirds come from the fuel sector. If you add commodities like metal and wood, then it amounts to 90 per cent of all exports," commented one Deutsche Bank economist.
"If we look at the statistics, income inequality now is the same as at the start of 2000, even though arguably the authorities have done quite a bit to address the lowest strata of society," he adds, pointing to high wage increases for doctors, teachers and others in the public sector.