The first time that the Spanish press typed the name of Mijaíl Fridman (Lviv, 57 years old) was in 2002: he was the main partner of the company that rented the Prestige from the owner who chartered it. Twenty years later he is back in the news because the European Union has included him on the list of businessmen sanctioned for being “one of Russia’s main financiers and facilitator of Putin’s closest circle.” In Spain he owns 77% of the Dia supermarkets, which he managed from LetterOne, the Luxembourg-based fund where Fridman left his post after the sanction “so as not to harm shareholders or workers.” From the agency that handles his public relations in Spain they have not heard from him since then. They are not the only ones: other people who have worked for him speculate about his fate, but prefer not to comment.
The son of an engineer and a housewife, and a graduate in Metallurgical Engineering, the former richest man in London is an art lover who owns a collection of paintings with warholsplays the piano and, as Elisabet Shimpfössl, sociologist and author of Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoise (Rich Russians: from the oligarchy to the bourgeoisie), does not neglect his role as patron. In the Ukraine he promoted the Jazz Festival; in London, where he has a mansion and businesses, he sponsored several works by the Opera Ballet, and was the architect of the first concert that Paul McCartney gave in Moscow’s Red Square in 2003.
Businessman close to the Kremlin, the position at LetterOne is not the only one he has left lately. On March 3 he left the council of the Ukrainian Baby Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a ravine near kyiv where the Nazis killed thousands of Jews, gypsies and the mentally ill between 1941 and 1943. In the 1960s, the construction of a sports stadium was planned on the site and it was not until the 1990s, when Ukraine became independent from Russia, that it began to be claimed as a space for the memory of the Holocaust. This lack of recognition is one of the reasons why it is not yet known whether 100,000 or 150,000 were killed.
A ‘Holocaust Disneyland’
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That is one of the things that Fridman wanted to remedy by taking the reins of a project that he arrived at in 2015 —Putin had already annexed Crimea— with 100 million dollars under his arm, a plan that included “the largest library on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe” and a group of academics in charge of reconstructing the history of the massacre. As head of the museum, film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who devised a role-playing game in which visitors could be victims, collaborators, Nazis or prisoners of war. Some Ukrainian Jewish leaders called it “a Disneyland of the Holocaust.”
But the most enduring controversy had to do with Fridman and the origin of his fortune. The Ukrainian Jewish community wanted the government to safeguard the memory of him, not a businessman, even though he was a compatriot of theirs and, like them, a Jew. And less if that businessman was linked to Putin: to give a single example of the commercial relationship between the owner of Dia and the Kremlin, Fridman was president of TNK-BP, the third largest oil producer in Russia, for nine years.
The arrival of Volodymyr Zelenzky, the first Ukrainian president of the Jewish faith, made them think that he would put a stop to Fridman, whom they saw as a Trojan horse at the Baby Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. But the Zelensky government ended up signing a collaboration agreement with the memorial in 2021 and contributing a million dollars to an institution that has just announced that while this war lasts, it will divert its funds and its activity to provide humanitarian aid to the victims of the war. Russian invasion.
Little given to bragging, Mikhail Fridman’s style is more ambiguous than other oligarchs. His resignation at the Ukrainian memorial has spared the World Center for the Commemoration of the Shoah in Jerusalem from having to cut off its collaborations, as it has done with another Russian and Jewish businessman sanctioned by the EU: Roman Abramovich, whom the Prime Minister English League has also expelled as owner of Chelsea. Fridman is much more discreet, that’s why he doesn’t have football clubs but banks (Alfa Bank, the first Russian private bank); the supermarket chain X5 (the one with the most stores in Russia) or a telecommunications company, VimpelCom, based in the Netherlands.
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He has also had lawsuits. In Spain, two. In the one that is still open in the National Court, he is accused of the bankruptcy of the technology company ZED. From the other, where he was tried for the crash in the Dia stock market, he was exonerated. It was in one of those appearances where his voice could be heard: soft and serious, with which he played the confusion, implying that he did not understand the questions well, not even in English, a language in which he expresses himself fluently in his business and in the meetings of the Baby Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, broadcast by Youtube, in which he participated until December 2021.
As the sociologist Schimpfössl explains, if there is one thing Fridman knows, it is swimming and putting away clothes. That’s why he makes deals with the Kremlin but goes to funerals like that of Boris Nemtsov, politician and opponent of Putin assassinated in 2015 and although he is an atheist, many of his patronage activities are related to the Jewish community and that is why he is the founder of the Jewish Nobel Prize, an award that he delivers in another country where he also has a nationality: Israel. He does it every year through the Genesis Philanthropy Group at a gala of millionaires that has awarded stars like Michel Douglas or Steven Spielberg, because in addition to money (it ranks 127th on the Forbes list), Fridman has an enviable and very varied agenda. Proof of this is the presence of the Nobel Prize for Literature Alexandra Alexievich on the board of the Baby Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
culture as a shield
For Schimpsfössl, all this activity has one goal: to clean up his image. Also for one of his biggest detractors, Yosif Zissels, a Ukrainian human rights activist and member of the Board of the World Jewish Congress who says that no one can believe that Russia allows a businessman with whom he does so much business “to invest 100 million dollars in enemy ground. So he commented on Time last fallwhere Zissels said that Fridman is Jewish, but like many Ukrainians, he thinks that it was the collaborationists and not the Germans who committed the Baby Yar massacre, an idea that links to one of the arguments that Putin gives to justify his latest invasion: denazification Ukraine.
Reluctant to give interviews, Fridman has been somewhat more communicative these days, sending a letter in which he claimed to be “deeply attached to the Ukrainian and Russian peoples” and see “the current conflict as a tragedy for both.” He, too, lamented the bloodshed. But he did not condemn the invasion of Putin, whose troops launched a bomb on March 2 near the ravine where in 1943, and before withdrawing, the Nazis exhumed and burned thousands of corpses, making it impossible for their relatives to identify them forever.
Zelensky was quick to pronounce: “The Russians have an order to erase our history. Erase our country. Erase us all.” A day later Fridman resigned from his post at the memorial. It remains to be seen whether, like two decades ago, he will be able to come out of this war as he came out of the Prestige: almost without blemish.
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