Oleg Deripaska (2 January 1968-) was a Russian oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin who interfered with the 2016 presidential election in the United States through his associate Paul Manafort.
Biography[]
Oleg Deripaska was born in Dzerzhinsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1968, and he became a metals broker specializing in the aluminum trade during the 1990s. He later expanded into the energy, machinery, financial services, and agribusiness industries, and, in 2000, he founded Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world by the 2010s. By 2007, he was Russia's richest man with a net worth of $28 billion, but he lost a substantial part of his fortune during the Great Recession. In September 2015 and September 2016, the FBI twice failed to turn him into an informant against President Vladimir Putin, and he instead took part in Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election by awarding a $10 million annual contract to Paul Manafort to promote Russian political, business, and media interests in the United States. In April 2018, the US government sanctioned Deripaska and 23 other Russian tycoons and officials, but the sanctions were lifted in early 2019, and he built a Rusal facility in US Senator Mitch McConnell's home state in Kentucky to provide 1,500 new jobs in exchange for McConnell voting to lift sanctions on Russia.