Roman Abramovich started his multi-billion-dollar business during his army service where he sold
stolen gasoline to some of the commissioned officers of his unit. After a brief stint in the Soviet Army, he married his first wife, Olga. He first worked as a street-trader and then as a mechanic at a local factory. At the peak of perestroika, Abramovich sold imported rubber ducks from his Moscow apartment. Some sources suggest that these ducks were
imported illegally, but no evidence of this exists.
A 2,000-ruble wedding present from Olga's parents (about £1,000 or US$2,000 at that time) was invested by Abramovich in
smuggling of black market goods or contraband to sell in Moscow in or around December 1987. Abramovich soon doubled, then tripled, the investment, his confidence growing with each success in this smuggling business. Soon he progressed to making plastic toys (including plastic sailors) and started up an automobile parts cooperative. He attended the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow (where he sold retreaded car tires as a sideline), then traded commodities for Runicom, a Swiss trading company.
In 1988, as Perestroika opened up opportunities for entrepreneurs in the Soviet Union, Abramovich got a chance to legitimize his underworld business. He and Olga set up a company making dolls. "It brought success almost immediately," says Olga. Due to his business acumen, within a few years his wealth spread from oil conglomerates to pig farms and he also started investing in other businesses. Abramovich set up and liquidated at least 20 companies during the early 1990s, in sectors as diverse as tire retreading and bodyguard recruitment.
From 1992 to 1995, Abramovich founded five companies that conducted resale, produced consumer goods, and acted as intermediaries, eventually specializing in the trading of oil and oil products. However, in 1992, he was
arrested and sent to prison in a case of
theft of government property: AVEKS-Komi sent a train containing 55 cisterns of diesel fuel, worth 3.8 million roubles, from the Ukhta Oil Refinery;
Abramovich met the train in Moscow and resent the shipment to the Kaliningrad military base under a fake agreement, but the fuel arrived in Riga. Abramovich co-operated with the investigation, and the case was closed after the oil production factory was compensated by the diesel's buyer, the Latvian-US company, Chikora International.[18]
In 1995, Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, an associate of President Boris Yeltsin, acquired the controlling interest in the large oil company Sibneft. The deal was within the controversial loans-for-shares program and each partner paid US$100 million for half of the company, below the stake's stock market value of US$150 million at the time, and rapidly turned it up into billions. The fast-rising value of the company led many observers, in hindsight, to suggest that the real cost of the company should have been in the billions of dollars. Abramovich later admitted in court that
he paid huge bribes (in billions) to government officials and
obtained protection from gangsters to acquire these and other assets (including aluminium assets during the aluminium wars).
Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good returns.