Famous for
- Founder and former owner of Tinkoff Bank, one of the world’s leading online banks.
- Due to his anti-war stance, he is no longer a billionaire. Threatened with the nationalization of his assets, he was forced to sell his stake in Tinkoff Bank at a price dozens of times below its market value.
Assets
- Prior to 2022 the family fund held a 35.1% stake in TCS Group, the parent company of Tinkoff Bank, one of the world’s leading online banks. The market value of the bank as of 2023 is 653.3 billion rubles (about $58.42 billion). It serves more than 30 million customers.
- In 2020, Tinkov launched La Datcha, an icebreaker yacht built especially for Tinkov at a cost of more than $100 million (7.2 billion rubles).
- Tinkov owns the La Datcha Collection hotel business, which rents out premium villas and yachts.
Interests and hobbies
- Tinkov is a Candidate Master of Sports of the USSR in cycling. In 2005, he founded the Tinkoff Restaurants professional cycling team (later Tinkoff Credit Systems). Between 2013 and 2016, he owned the professional cycling team Tinkoff-Saxo, in which he invested about €50 million (2.9 billion rubles).
- In 2009, Tinkov hosted the Business Secrets with Oleg Tinkov media project. In the show, he interviewed numerous well-known entrepreneurs. Between 2011 and 2021, episodes were released on the YouTube channel of the same name, which had 360,000 subscribers.
Professional history
Oleg Tinkov was born on 25 December 1967 in the village of Polysaevo, Kemerovo Region. After leaving school he worked for a while in a mine.
Between 1986 and 1988, he served in the KGB border troops in the Far East. After completing his compulsory military service, Tinkov enrolled at the Leningrad Mining Institute (now Saint Petersburg Mining University), but dropped out in his third year.
While at university, he started selling jeans and perfume and eventually met Oleg Zherebtsov, Oleg Leonov and Andrey Rogachev, all of whom would go on to become prominent Russian entrepreneurs. During this time, Tinkov also became involved in shuttle trading, setting up operations – mainly in technology – between Siberia and Leningrad, Poland, Warsaw and Singapore.
In 1992, Tinkov set up Petrosib in order to manage his businesses.
In 1993 he opened a Sony store in Saint Petersburg, which within three years grew into a chain of nine Technoshock and MusicShock stores.
In 1997, Technoshock was sold for $7 million (about 40 billion rubles at the time, before the 1998 denomination) and acquired by Simtex, while the MusicShock stores were sold to Gala Records.
Some media report that, at the same time, Tinkov launched a record label, Shock Records, on which popular Russian bands Leningrad and Kirpichi released their debut albums. The label was sold to PolyGram Russia in 1998.
In the 1990s, Tinkov says he spent a total of around six years in the United States. He first went there in 1993, became an American citizen in 1996 and completed a marketing course at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000.
In 1998, Tinkov founded Daria, which produced dumplings and other frozen semi-finished products. The brand was memorable for its eye-catching marketing campaigns, including billboards featuring images of women’s buttocks and products branded with the word ‘Smak’, the same name as the famous cooking show. In 2001, Daria was sold to Roman Abramovich’s holding company for $21 million (about 609 million rubles at the time).
Also in 1998, Tinkov opened the Tinkoff beer restaurant alongside a small brewery in Saint Petersburg. By 2005, the chain had grown to eight restaurants across Russia and two breweries producing beer under the Tinkoff brand. Tinkov’s business was also notable for its marketing: a street in the city where the brewery was located was even renamed in honour of the entrepreneur’s (entirely fictitious) brewer ancestor.
In 2005, Tinkov sold the production assets to the InBev group for $200 million (about 5.6 billion rubles), and in 2009 the entire restaurant business was sold to the Mint Capital fund.
In 2006, using the proceeds from the sale of the beer business, Tinkov bought Khimmashbank, which had a banking licence, and created Tinkoff Credit Systems (known as Tinkoff Bank since 2015), a bank specializing in remote services. Tinkov himself later described his project as the first Russian online bank.
In 2013, Tinkoff Credit Systems launched its initial public offering, and was valued at $3.2 billion (about 100 billion rubles).
At the same time, Tinkov renounced his American citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on the funds received from the company’s IPO.
In 2016, Oleg Tinkov launched La Datcha, a service offering private villa rentals in Val Thorens, Courchevel, Forte dei Marmi and Astrakhan. In 2022, he announced his intention to sell all his tourism business in Russia. The amount of the deal and the identities of the buyers were not disclosed.
In 2019, Oleg Tinkov was diagnosed with leukaemia. As a result, in 2020 he transferred his stake (40.4%) in the parent company of Tinkoff Bank – TCS Group – to the family fund and also left the company’s management.
The entrepreneur underwent treatment in the UK and in 2022 reported a complete remission after a bone marrow transplant.
In 2022, Tinkov sold his stake in TCS Group to Vladimir Potanin’s Interros. Tinkov himself claimed that he did this under pressure from the Russian authorities because of his anti-war stance. He estimated the amount of the deal at 3% of the actual market value.
In 2022, Tinkov was added to the UK sanctions list following military action in Ukraine but, after an appeal was made to the authorities in 2023, all restrictions were lifted.
In 2020, Tinkov was found to have Cypriot citizenship and a residence permit in Italy.
In 2023, he renounced his Russian citizenship and was reported to be living in Switzerland.
Deals and ventures
- In 2011, Tinkoff Credit Systems bought the rights to use a very well-known song by the cult band Kino in an advertisement for $1 million (about 30 million rubles at the time).
- In 2013, Tinkov bought the insurance company Moskva from Mikhail Fridman’s AlfaStrakhovanie, which later became the basis of Tinkoff Bank’s insurance business. The value of the transaction was not disclosed.
- In 2017, TCS Group bought 55% of CloudPayments, a startup that processes online transactions through various payment systems, for 290 million rubles (about $5 million). Two years later, Tinkov’s group bought a further 35% stake.
- In 2020, TCS Group signed an agreement with AFI Development to lease nearly 78,000 square metres in a Moscow business centre for its headquarters. Experts estimate that the annual fee will be about 2.5 billion rubles ($40 million). Russian media described the deal as the largest in the history of the office market.
Achievements
- In 2020, Oleg Tinkov was named Businessperson of the Year by Forbes Russia.
- Tinkov has published four books: I’m Like Everyone Else, How to Become a Businessman, Revolution: How to Build the World’s Largest Online Bank and Business Without an MBA.
- In 2018, the international magazine Global Finance awarded Tinkoff Bank the Best Digital Bank Award, recognizing it as the best online retail bank in the world.
- Tinkoff Bank was ranked number one in the Markswebb Rank & Report rating of online banks in 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2020.
Criticism and disputes
- Since 2009, Tinkov has consistently published posts on his social networks criticizing Pavel Durov, the founder of VK and Telegram. In these posts, he often insults Durov and criticizes his approach to business. Durov’s partners and his companies’ spokespeople often respond on his behalf.
- In 2017, Tinkov had a high-profile interactionwith a blogger from the YouTube channel Nemagia (which had 1.5 million subscribers at the time). They published a video criticizing the businessman and insulting his wife. Tinkov filed a lawsuit against the bloggers, demanding that they remove the video and compensate him for moral damages. When the public and the Russian YouTube community sided with the bloggers, Tinkov withdrew all claims.
- In 2019, the US charged Tinkov with tax evasion and filing fraudulent tax returns when he was a citizen. He was arrested in the UK and faced up to six years in prison. The businessman eventually reached a plea bargain and paid $509 million (about 37.15 billion rubles).
- In 2023, a court ordered Oleg Tinkov to pay 20 million rubles (about $24,000) to another Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, over a social media post in which the former criticized the latter.
Attitudes to Russian–Ukrainian conflict
In February 2022, Tinkov spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “Innocent people are dying in Ukraine right now, every day, and this is unthinkable and unacceptable! Nations should spend money on medical treatment for people and on research to defeat cancer, not on war. We are against this war!”
Tinkov went on to write a number of other virulently anti-war posts, such as: “I don’t see a single beneficiary of this insane war! Innocent people and soldiers are dying. Generals wake up with a hangover and realize they have a shit army. And where will a good army come from when everything else in the country is shit and mired in nepotism, subservience and deference to rank?”
Community work
In 2021, Oleg Tinkov established a charitable foundation, the Tinkov Family Foundation, to fight blood cancer and promote the institution of blood donation. As of 2023, the foundation has allocated 391 million rubles (about $4.7 million) to support 27 Russian clinics and spends more than 35 million rubles (about $420,000) a year on training doctors and nurses.
Additional information
Married, three kids.
Source for information: Forbes.com, Nytimes.com, Rbc.ru, Kommersant.ru, Wikipedia.org
