German Khan

Famous for

German Khan is a co-founder of Alfa Group, one of the largest private financial and investment consortia in Russia, which owns Alfa-Bank, the country’s largest private bank.

Assets

Alfa Group is one of the largest private financial and investment consortia in Russia, and includes the country’s largest private bank Alfa-Bank. Khan held a 21% stake in the bank until 2022, when he transferred his stake to a junior partner. The bank has assets worth 6.2 trillion rubles (about $74.69 billion) as of 2023.

Before transferring his stake to the junior partner in 2022 through his investment holding company LetterOne, he and his business partners owned various assets with a total value of $18.654 billion (almost 1.250 trillion rubles) as of 2022, including:

German oil and gas company Wintershall Dea (33% stake);
Turkey’s largest telecom operator Turkcell (19.8% stake);
Telecommunications holding company VEON (56.2% stake);
British health food chain Holland & Barrett;
American pharmaceutical company Parexel
BakeMark, one of the leaders in the American baking industry;
DIA, a chain of supermarkets in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina and China.

Through Alfa Group and alongside the same partners, Khan owns a 48.7% stake in X5 Retail Group, one of Russia’s leading retailers. The company is valued at 645.5 billion rubles (approximately $6.65 billion) as of 2023.

Together with Alexei Kuzmichev and Mikhail Fridman, he owns a 90% stake in Rosvodokanal, one of Russia’s largest private water and wastewater companies.

Interests and hobbies

Extreme off-road racing enthusiast. During the 2010s he regularly took part in Camel Trophy competitions.

Professional history

German Khan was born in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, on 24 October 1961. After school he worked as a mechanic at the Kyiv Experimental Plant of Non-Standard Equipment.

In 1982 he graduated with honours from the Kyiv Industrial and Pedagogical Technical School and in 1988 from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, where he met his future business partners Alexei Kuzmichev and Mikhail Fridman.

In 1989, Khan founded the Alexandrina cooperative, which sewed jeans and sold them in Moscow’s Riga market.

Between 1990 and 1999 he held senior positions at Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa-Eco. Initially, the company was involved in trading in a variety of sectors, and Mikhail Fridman invited Khan to run it. The company subsequently focused on investment and the export of oil and metals, becoming the foundation of the Alfa Group consortium.

In 1999, Khan tried his hand at politics. He was a member of the All Russia electoral bloc led by Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. All Russia lost the elections and then merged with other movements in 2001 to form a party supporting Vladimir Putin, United Russia.

It was during this period that he met Viktor Vekselberg, with whom he bought a 40% stake in the oil company TNK for $810 million (about 7.6 billion rubles). Between 1997 and 2013, Khan was a member of the top management of TNK (called TNK-BP after its merger with British Petroleum in 2003).

In 2003, the Alfa Group consortium launched Rosvodokanal on the basis of a company purchased for several million dollars (tens of millions of rubles), which became the country’s largest private water utility. Khan heads the company’s board of directors.

He moved to London in the early 2010s.

In 2013, together with his business partners Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, Alexei Kuzmichev and Andrei Kosogov, he founded the investment holding company LetterOne. The joint investment totalled $15.36 billion (about 491 billion rubles). The partners received this investment money from the sale of the oil company TNK-BP.

After the sale of TNK-BP in 2013, he headed L1 Energy, which was created by the Alfa Group consortium to invest in the international oil and gas sector.

In 2022, German Khan transferred his stake in Alfa-Bank and LetterOne to his junior partner Andrei Kosogov due to EU sanctions. Khan is also sanctioned by the US, Ukraine, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Khan returned to Russia from the UK in 2023.

Deals and ventures

In 1997, Alfa-Bank, together with Leonard Blavatnik’s Access and Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova, acquired a 40% stake in the Tyumen Oil Company (TNK).
In 2003, British Petroleum (BP) bought 50% of the company for $6.75 billion (about … rubles).
In 2013, the Russian state company Rosneft bought 100% of the merged TNK-BP. The share of Alfa-Bank’s co-owners was about 25%. Together with them, German Khan earned $13.86 billion (almost 430 billion rubles) from the deal.
In 2005, Alfa Group acquired a controlling stake in X5 Retail Group, which brought together Russia’s largest retail chains Pyaterochka and Perekrestok. The transaction value exceeded one billion US dollars (over 28 billion rubles).
In 2014, Khan and his partners acquired one of Germany’s largest oil and gas companies, RWE Dea, for €5.1 billion (about 255 billion rubles). In 2019, the company merged with BASF’s Wintershall. The combined company became the largest oil and gas company in Europe.
The media associates German Khan with luxury real estate in the UK, notably with regard to the purchase of two flats in London for £62 million (about 2.8 billion rubles) in 2008 and a mansion in the luxury village of Virginia Water for £26 million (about 1.64 billion rubles) in 2014.
In 2020, Rosvodokanal merged with state-owned VEB.RF to form a water supply joint venture with 75% and 25% stakes respectively. It was reported that this would help the private company to remove administrative barriers. The volume of loans to the new company was estimated at 12–14 billion rubles (about $167–194 million).

Achievements

Khan is a recipient of ceremonial weapons awarded as gifts by former presidents of Ukraine, having received one in 2004 from Leonid Kuchma and another in 2011 from Viktor Yanukovych.

Criticism

In 2020, Alfa-Bank shareholders Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Petr Aven won a London court case over BuzzFeed’s publication of the “Trump dossier”. The dossier claimed that Fridman was advising Vladimir Putin on relations with the US. The judge ordered the report to be corrected.
In 2021, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office attempted to recover $104.5 million (about 7.63 billion rubles) from Alfa-Bank as corruption assets in connection with a case against convicted ex-minister Mikhail Abyzov. The parties subsequently reached a settlement and the bank donated the funds to charity. The media reported that Khan was in direct contact with FSB director Alexander Bortnikov to settle the matter.

Attitudes to Russian–Ukrainian conflict

Hasn’t spoken out publicly.

Community work

German Khan is a board member of the Russian Jewish Congress and co-founder of the Genesis Philanthropy Group, a charitable foundation dedicated to promoting Jewish identity.
In 2016, together with Mikhail Fridman, Khan invested in the establishment of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre in Ukraine. Khan’s relatives were among the victims of crimes against Jews in the area.
In 2004, Alfa-Bank launched the Life Line programme for seriously ill children, which later became the charitable foundation of the same name and one of the largest in Russia. In its first ten years alone, the organization raised 1.4 billion rubles and helped 7,000 people.