Yury Valentinovich Kovalchuk is a Russian billionaire businessman and financier who is "reputed to be Vladimir Putin's personal banker".
12 Facts About Yury Kovalchuk
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The Panama Papers leak revealed that Kovalchuk had transferred at least $1 billion to an offshore entity.
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Yury Kovalchuk is a close friend of Putin: he hosted the wedding of Putin's daughter Katerina Tikhonova to Kirill Shamalov at his ski resort, Igora, in 2013.
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Yury Kovalchuk was the second child in a family of history teachers.
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In 1992, Yury Kovalchuk was a founder of the STREAM Corporation.
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Since the early 1990s, Yury Kovalchuk has owned a dacha in Solovyovka in the Priozersky District of the Leningrad region, located on the eastern shore of the Komsomolskoye lake on the Karelian Isthmus near Saint Petersburg.
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Later that year, Yury Kovalchuk acquired the rights to Ted Turner's Russian assets including the Russian version of CNN, Cartoon Network and Boomerang.
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In 2017, Yury Kovalchuk purchased the century-old Novy Svet vineyard in Crimea for $26.4 million in one of the first privatization deals in the region since the annexation of the region by Russia.
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On 15 April 2021, Alexei Navalny's website stated that since 2003 Yury Kovalchuk is the owner of Putin's residence at Valdai which is on the southern 100 hectares of a peninsula between Lake Uzhin and Lake Valdai in the Novgorod Oblast near Saint Petersburg and is across Lake Valdai from Valday.
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Yury Kovalchuk owns shares in several of Russia's most influential TV channels, including Channel One Russia.
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Yury Kovalchuk was one of several individuals sanctioned by the US Treasury Department on 20 March 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.
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Yury Kovalchuk was sanctioned by the UK government in 2014 in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian War.