Vladimir Chernukhin

From 1986 to 1996, he worked at Tekhnopromimport, a trade house of the USSR and the Russian Federation devoted to the import of industrial machinery.

[citation needed] Chernukhin earned a Candidate of Science (PhD equivalent) degree in economics from the Moscow Finance Academy and, in 2003, he was ranked among the 100 top managers of the Russian Federation.

Kasyanov and his entire government had been dismissed by President Putin three months earlier (in February 2004) due to fundamental differences in policy.

Mikhail Kasyanov, who at the time was campaigning against President Putin in respect of the upcoming presidential election in Russia,[18][19] was one of the two witnesses at the civil ceremony of the wedding.

[1] As per the media reports, Chernukhin is known to be a loyalist to former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who in 2005 became an opponent of Putin.

[27] In the early 2000s, Chernukhin entered into a joint venture business named as Navio Holdings Ltd with Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska allegedly paid a multi-million dollar bribe to a key witness to support his false case.

However, all of Deripaska's claims were dismissed and he was ordered to pay Chernukhin approximately $100 million for his stake in the joint venture business.

[30][31] While the legal proceeding was going on in the UK, in 2018 the US Justice Department accused Deripaska of "extortion, racketeering, bribery, links to organized crime and even ordering the murder of a businessman" as The New York Times reported.

In his litigation with Deripaska, Chernukhin's evidence was that he used trust structures to protect his assets from attack after his escape from Russia.