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Silver spoons: Lukoil CEO’s son leads Forbes richest Russian heirs list

The list includes 20 families, where each child enjoys at least $2.3 billion in personal wealth
Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov  Sergei Savostyanov/TASS
Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov
© Sergei Savostyanov/TASS

MOSCOW, May 24. / TASS /. Yusuf Alekperov, the son of Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov still tops the charts as Russia’s richest heir, according to Forbes Magazine. The list includes 20 families, where each child enjoys at least $2.3 billion in personal wealth, and there are 46 children in these families.

The business periodical has published this rating for the third time. The list is compiled by the magazine’s experts, who divided the estate of each billionaire among the officially recognized children. The share of the tycoons’ spouses were not taken into consideration in the calculations.

"Yusuf Alekperov, the only son of Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov, became the richest heir ($17 bln)," the magazine writes. The second and third places are occupied by the two children of the key owner of Novatek and Sibur Leonid Mikhelson ($8.9 bln for each child). In fourth and fifth places are the offspring of EuroChem owner Andrei Melnichenko ($7.3 bln each).

The composition of the rating’s participants has changed slightly from 2017, the news magazine reports. It has two new members - Denis, the son of IPG Photonics founder and chief executive Valentin Gapontsev, and Alexander, the son of Evraz CEO Alexander Frolov. They replaced the progenies of Safmar Group owner Mikhail Gutseriyev and Rusal's former CEO Oleg Deripaska.

According to the general statistics quoted by Forbes, as of April 20, 2018, there were 102 billionaires in Russia, and their combined fortunes amount to $403 billion. If this wealth was divided equally among the total number of their children - 289 of them - they all would also be billionaires with an average estate worth $1.4 billion.