Oleg Tinkov

Oleg Yuryevich Tinkov (Russian: Олег Юрьевич Тиньков, Greek: Όλεγκ Γιούριεβιτς Τινκοφ) is a Russian-born former billionaire, entrepreneur and businessman.

He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay over $508 million in unpaid taxes, fines and a fraud penalty, as well as time served and a year's supervised release.

[10][11] After he publicly criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine in April 2022, he said officials of the Putin administration threatened to nationalize Tinkoff Bank, and he went into hiding after selling his 35% stake under pressure.

[18][19] In 1988, Oleg Tinkov entered the Mining Institute university, which had a large number of foreign students and offered promising opportunities in trade.

[24] Their daughter Daria Tinkov studied at King's College London, sons Pasha and Roman at St Edward's School, Oxford.

To simplify the registration of documents he registered a limited liability partnership Petrosib in St. Petersburg, and then regional companies Petrosib-Kemerovo, Petrosib-Novosibirsk and Petrosib-Omsk and others.

In the beginning, Oleg himself flew to Singapore, then began to use commercial air freight, but the turning point came when an Indian dealer Ashok Vasmani shipped him a half-container of TVs on credit.

[33] Daria first became popular due to an advertising campaign in which five billboards in St. Petersburg and two in Moscow showed an image of female buttocks covered with flour and the caption Your favorite pelmeni!.

[44] After that Tinkov did a deal to sell nad lease back the premises of the Tinkoff restaurants to the management company Troika Dialog for about $10–12 million.

[46] On November 18, 2005, on Necker Island, owned by billionaire Richard Branson, Oleg Tinkov presented a draft or his proposal for a future bank.

[48][49] Tinkoff Credit Systems reduced costs at the expense of marketing which was non-standard for the banking sector[50][51] and the widespread use of computer processing of the data instead of human labor.

The IPO of the bank was listed as one of the largest deals in the 2013 Russian version of Forbes; Tinkov doubled his fortune and took position 1210 in the world ranking of billionaires.

[65] In February 2022, sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of their 2022 invasion of Ukraine heavily impacted the ruble and Tinkoff's shares crashed.

It was composed of members of the Russian national Track cycling team, including Mikhail Ignatiev, Nikolay Trusov, Alexander Serov, Sergey Klimov, Pavel Brutt and Ivan Rovny.

[81] Successful performances of the team, including these at the stages of the Giro d'Italia in 2008, attracted the attention of former cyclist Igor Makarov, an owner of Itera corporation.

In 2014, he offered the captain Tinkoff-Saxo Alberto Contador and his rivals Chris Froome, who rode for Sky Procycling and Vincenzo Nibali of the Astana Pro Team 1 million euros each for performing in all three of the world's major stage races.

[96] In September 2015 Tinkov announced that he would invest 250 million rubles in the construction of a hotel and recreational complex in the Elizovo district on Kamchatka, where he often stayed.

[98] In June of the same year he opened two Tinkoff luxurious chalets called La Datcha: one in the ski resort of Courchevel and the second – in Val Thorens.

[101] Tinkov is one of many Russian oligarchs named in the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, CAATSA, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2017.

The fake page was presented in the Toponymy Commission of St. Petersburg [ru] with a proposal to memorialize the Tinkoff family line in the street name.

Officials did not notice the fraud and agreed to the company's proposal; on 7 July 2003 Tinkoff Lane appeared in Pushkin, Saint Petersburg.

Shortly after its release, on August 28, 2017, Oleg Tinkov filed a lawsuit with the Kemerovo District Court for the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation.

[119] On February 27, 2020, Tinkoff Credit Systems Group Holding PLC (TCSGH) announced that Tinkov was attending court hearings initiated in London by the US Internal Revenue Service.

Two days later, on March 1, 2020, The Daily Express published an article claiming that Tinkov paid £20m bail to avoid being held in jail until an extradition hearing was due to take place in April.

[6] On December 18, 2020, Tinkov reported that his last analysis after a bone marrow transplant showed complete remission from cancer "at the molecular level".

Its tasks were to promote donorship, create a national register for bone marrow stem cells, build transplantation centers in remote regions of Russia and offer training programs to haematologists.

Tinkov wrote on his Instagram page, on 19 April 2022, in Russian: "The generals, waking up with a hangover, realized that they had a shit army", "I don't see a single beneficiary of this crazy war!

Finally, he wrote in English: "Dear 'collective West' please give Mr. Putin a clear exit to save his face and stop this massacre.

"[134][135] On the next day after the first post with critics of the war in Ukraine Tinkov said his executives were contacted by the presidential administration with a demand to sell his 35% stake, otherwise the bank would be nationalized.

"[137] Because of these statements, one of the public organizations turned to the Russian Prosecutor General's Office with a request to recognize Tinkov as a "Foreign agent" (after emigration and renunciation of citizenship, this is a rather symbolic action).

Oleg Tinkov at Skolkovo Moscow School of Management event, 2016
Oleg Tinkov at Tinkoff-Saxo event in Moscow, 2014
Oleg Tinkov, Giro d'Italia 2015