Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko (8 March 1972-) was a Russian oligarch who founded the fertilizer producer EuroChem Group and the coal company SUEK, acquiring a net worth of $17.7 billion by 2021.
Biography[]
Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko was born in Gomel, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union in 1972, the son of a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, both of whom worked as teachers. He opened a currency exchange booth while at university, and he co-founded MDM Bank in 1993 at the age of 21. His bank's conservative credit policy enabled the bank to survive the 1998 Russian financial crisis, and, in 2000, he founded the MDM Group for industrial investments. He went on to found the fertilizer producer EuroChem Group and the coal company SUEK, selling his banking interests in 2007, on the eve of the Great Recession. On 12 March 2022, his Sailing Yacht A was seized by Italian authorities in the port of Trieste as a consequence of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.