HUGE MONEY IN OIL

Energy Billionaires
December 7, 2006 (Forbes)
- Energy is a big industry…12 oil and gas companies and six utilities in the top 100 of Forbes' list of the world's 2000 largest public companies. Oil giants Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP are in the top ten…dwarfed by the state-owned oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela and China.

- To find billionaires who have made their fortunes from energy, look beyond the giants to the few remaining wild frontiers of the industry--Russia and the U.S. Those two countries accounted for 38 of the 45 energy-related billionaires…
- [First] At…$18.2 billion, is expatriate Russian Roman Abramovich. He made money in a series of controversial oil-export deals in the early 1990s…his fortune took off in 1995 when he teamed up with Boris Berezovsky to take over oil giant Sibneft at a fraction of its market value.
- When Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000 to escape fraud charges, he sold out to Abramovich, who in turn in 2005 sold his 72.6% stake in Sibneft to state energy giant Gazprom for $13 billion. He, too, decamped to London…
[Second] The next…billionaires, brothers Charles and David Koch…$12 billion apiece…

- Their father, Fred C. Koch, was an MIT grad who invented a way to turn heavy oil into gasoline. He took the technology to the old Soviet Union, became disillusioned with Stalin and returned to the U.S., where he joined the conservative John Birch Society.
- Charles became chairman of Koch Industries after his father's death, expanded into chemicals, pipelines, asphalt and commodities trading. A $21 billion take over of Georgia-Pacific added lumber and paper and made Koch Industries the U.S.'s largest privately held company…
[Third] Vagit Alekperov is the highest ranking active oilman on our list. Fifteen years ago he was the Soviet Union's deputy minister of fuel and energy. Now he is the president and one of the biggest shareholders in Lukoil…with a fortune of $11 billion.

- He is a noted Putin loyalist at a time when much of Russia's oil and gas industry is being renationalized under state energy giant Gazprom.
- Lukoil has growing interests outside of Russia, including refineries in Eastern Europe and the Getty gas station chain in the U.S. Lukoil closed the biggest deal in its history in the fall of 2005 when it bought Nelson Resources in Kazakhstan for $2 billion.
[Fourth] Viktor Vekselberg…$10 billion…another Russian who built his fortune in the 1990s after the break up of the old Soviet Union. Ukrainian-born Vekselberg, through his management company, Renova, orchestrated Russia's first successful hostile takeover, of the Vladimir Tractor Factory, in 1994. He later bought medium-size aluminum smelters and bauxite mines and united them into Sual Holding, Russia's second-largest aluminum company.

- Vekselberg made the bulk of his fortune when he and Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group took over TNK, which merged with BP in 2003…Like Lukoil's Alekperov, Vekselberg maintains strong Kremlin connections. A former subordinate serves as a political adviser to Putin…

- A harbinger of the future, if a distant one, is Tulsi Tanti…number 562 overall…$1.4 billion. This former textile trader from Pune, India, turned to alternative energy when escalating power costs threatened to put him out of business.
- He started a wind power venture in 1995. Last year, he listed his Suzlon Energy, which has built Asia's largest wind farm in southern India and is expanding into the U.S., China and Australia…