Vekselberg is chairman of Renova, an investment group in Russia. His holdings include a stake in Sulzer, a publicly traded manufacturer of pumps and compressors. Others interests include the aluminum producer Rusal, equipment maker Oerlikon and regional airports. He sold 12.5% of a Russian oil venture for $7 billion in 2013.
Vekselberg holds the bulk of his fortune through Russia-based Renova, which control a series of publicly traded and closely held entities, and private trusts, according to Swiss Stock Exchange disclosure documents and the Spark-Interfax database.
He sold 12.5% of Russian oil joint venture TNK-BP for $7 billion to Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, in March 2013. Cash investments reflect dividends, asset sales and purchases, taxes and market performance. They were updated on Feb. 13, 2025 based on the performance of a Russia inflation index.
Through Sual Partners Vekselberg controls 9.4% of publicly traded United Co. Rusal, Russia's largest aluminum producer, according to his representative. He owns shares in three publicly traded Swiss machinery, industrial equipment and steel manufacturers: 43.9% of Sulzer, 19% of Oerlikon and 5.7% of Swiss Steel.
He also holds stakes in more than a dozen closely held companies whose valuation details are available to Bloomberg clients in the asset note for each business. They include Russian utility company T Plus, ten regional Russian airports, chemical company Renova Orgsintez, Octo Telematics, a telematics services provider, a 49% stake in construction company Kortros and a 46% stake in solar modules producer Hevel.
The value of his cash holdings is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Viktor Vekselberg was born in Drohobych, Lviv Region, Ukraine, in 1957. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering in 1979, where he met his future partner, Len Blavatnik. He earned a doctorate in engineering from the USSR Academy of Sciences, and then spent about a decade working in a state lab.
Vekselberg and Blavatnik founded Renova Group to invest in metallurgy in 1990. Renova became one of the leading participants in the Russian government privatization program after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1996, Renova founded Sual Holding by merging Irkutsk and Ural aluminum smelters, setting up the second largest producer in Russia at that time. In the late 1990s, Blavatnik sold his stake in Renova to Vekselberg.
In 1997, Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group in a partnership with Vekselberg and Blavatnik acquired a 40 percent stake in TNK, a former state-owned oil company with interests in several West Siberian oil fields. Alfa Group, Blavatnik's Access Industries, and Vekselberg's Renova set up AAR to manage their oil and gas assets. In 2003, AAR and BP merged their Russian assets to establish TNK-BP, a joint venture.
TNK-BP, Russia's then third-largest oil producer, paid $38 billion in dividends to both sides between 2004 and 2011. In October 2012, state-owned Rosneft announced it would acquire the entire company, paying AAR $27.7 billion for its half of the venture in March 2013.
In the mid-2000s, Renova acquired stakes in Swiss-based manufacturing companies, Oerlikon and Sulzer. In 2013, Renova bought a stake in Schmolz + Bickenbach, a Swiss stainless steel group which was later renamed in Swiss Steel. Renova's total investments in these businesses equaled $6 billion.
Vekselberg was sanctioned in 2018 in retaliation for Moscow meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and by the UK in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.