Alexei Kuzmichev

His Alfa Group, which he shares with fellow billionaires German Khan and Mikhail Fridman, is the biggest financial and industrial group in Russia. Kuzmichev met his future partners in college. In 1991 they started Alfa Bank, which is now the biggest private bank by capital in Russia. The trio bought Tyumen Oil from the state in the late 1990s and merged it with BP's Russian assets into TNK-BP. The group also has stakes in two Russian cellular companies and owns the biggest retailer, X5. Kuzmichev heads the company called A1, which manages the assets Alfa Bank got from its debtors. Alexey Kuzmichev was born in 1962 in Kirov, a Russian city located west of the Ural Mountains. After serving in the border troops in Siberia's Trans-Baikal region, Kuzmichev enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1983, where he met German Khan and Mikhail Fridman. In the first year of his studies, he joined the Soviet Union's Communist Party. He graduated in 1988, and has since worked with Fridman and Khan. The trio first sold electronic goods, carpets and consumer staples -- enterprises that became the basis for Alfa-Eco, the holding company that today controls many of their investments. The trio also created a commodities trading company, Crown Trade and Finance, which moved oil between Europe, the U.S., Australia, Cuba and Iraq. Kuzmichev became Crown's CEO in 1996. In 2002, an oil tanker chartered by company successor Crown Resources, was denied entry to a Spanish port, broke during a storm and sank off the coast, spewing 20,000 tons of oil into the Atlantic Ocean. Alfa subsequently sold Crown. Kuzmichev returned to Alfa-Eco, which was renamed A1 in 2005. The billionaires landed the TNK deal, Khan and Kuzmichev's biggest financial success, in 1997. Along with fellow businessmen Viktor Vekselberg and Leonid Blavatnik, the Alfa partners bought a 40 percent interest in the former state-owned oil company with interests in several West Siberian oil fields. Two years later, they also acquired the most productive subsidiary of competitor, Sidanco -- then owned in part by BP -- which had been declared bankrupt by a commercial court in Siberia. BP's CEO at the time, John Browne, later called the legal system "rigged." BP had paid almost $8 billion by 2004 for half of TNK, while the other half was consolidated by Fridman and his partners under the holding company Alfa-Access-Renova (AAR). The investment formed TNK-BP, Russia's largest foreign oil investment. Khan became the company's Executive Director, the post he continues to hold. In 2008, TNK-BP CEO Bob Dudley -- now CEO of BP -- was forced to leave Russia after a strategy dispute. Legal complications arose in 2011. AAR sued BP over a separate Arctic development deal it tried to strike with Russian state-owned company Rosneft, citing a breach in a shareholder agreement. In 2012, BP executives announced that the company would sell its stake and Fridman stepped down from his role as CEO. In March 2013, the billionaires sold their half of the venture to Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, for $27.7 billion.