German Khan

Alfa's banking and oil businesses created the core fortune

Forbes traces Khan's entrepreneurial partnership with Mikhail Fridman and Alexei Kuzmichev to 1989, when the college friends started commodities trader Alfa-Eco. That venture became part of the broader Alfa Group, and Khan later cofounded Alfa Bank rather than entering the business through an inherited operating company documented in the reviewed sources. ^[1]

The partners expanded from trading and banking into oil. Forbes records that Alfa Group's Tyumen Oil interests were combined with BP's Russian assets in 2003 to create TNK-BP, while LetterOne's historical materials identify Khan as an executive director and management-board member of TNK-BP from 2003 through 2013. ^[1][2]

The pivotal liquidity event came in 2013, when Forbes reports that Khan and his partners sold their 25% TNK-BP stake for $14 billion. That transaction price belonged to the partnership stake as a whole, not to Khan personally, but it converted years of privately held banking-and-oil ownership into a large pool of realized capital. ^[1]

LetterOne redeployed capital after the TNK-BP exit

Khan subsequently became a cofounder of LetterOne, which was designed as a long-term investment vehicle for capital accumulated by the partners. LetterOne's 2017 review listed him as a cofounder while also documenting his earlier TNK-BP operating role, linking the later investment platform directly to the ownership and liquidity created in the preceding businesses. ^[2]

LetterOne announced in 2022 that Khan resigned from its positions, so historical cofounder economics should not be conflated with current management control. The reviewed record nevertheless supports a primarily self-created fortune built through company formation, dealmaking and retained ownership; confidence is medium because the business path is clear but the reviewed sources do not deeply reconstruct family finances before his entrepreneurial career. ^[1][3]