Mikhail Fridman

Fridman spent his childhood in Ukrainian city of Lvov and studied at the Moscow Institute of Steel & Alloys in 1980s. He founded Alfa Group in 1990s with college friends (and now fellow billionaires) German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev; it's now a diverse conglomerate with oil, retail, telecom and banking interests. Strong Kremlin connections include a former subordinate who now serves as a political adviser to Putin. In 2003 he merged his oil company, TNK, with British oil giant BP, an achievement, considering that six years prior the two parties were fighting, with protesting his methods for taking over a partly BP-owned oilfield. Now focusing on telecom; his Altimo group has telecom holdings in Ukraine, Turkey, Russia and Uzbekistan. In 2007 Fridman was declared unofficial winner of a protracted and multimillion-dollar legal battle over a stake in Russia's third-largest mobile carrier, Megafon.