Leonard Blavatnik

Leonard Blavatnik is the Founder and serves as Chairman at Access Industries. He was the Owner of Publishing House Province. Len is an American businessman, currently living in New York and London, including at a home on Kensington Palace Gardens. Born in the Soviet Union, he attended University in Moscow. He emigrated with his family from Russia to the U.S. in 1978, and became an American citizen in 1984. He received a master's in computer science from Columbia University and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School in 1989. In the West, he is known as Len Blavatnik. In 1986 he founded Access Industries, a New York-based international industrial group, of which he is Chairman and President. Access has long-term strategic holdings in Europe, North and South America. Initially, he moved into Russian investments, just after the fall of communism. With a friend from University, Viktor Vekselberg, he formed the Renova investment vehicle, and the two joined with Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group to form the AAR venture. Access has diversified its portfolio to include investments in industries such as oil, aluminum, petrochemicals and plastics, telecommunications, media, and real estate. AAR gained a controlling stake in Russian oil company TNK through privatisation auctions, then in 2003 sold a 50% stake to British Petroleum to form TNK-BP, one of Russia's largest oil companies, for which he serves on the board of directors. Blavatnik provides financial support and remains engaged in numerous educational pursuits. In addition to corporate directorships, Blavatnik sits on boards at Cambridge and Tel Aviv University, and he is a member of Harvard University's Committee on University Resources. An active philanthropist, Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation have been generous supporters of The National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Prince's Trust and numerous other leading cultural and charity institutions. Blavatnik also sits on, inter alia, the board of directors of the 92nd Street Y in New York, The White Nights Foundation of America and The Center for Jewish History in New York. He is also a member of the Board of Governors of The New York Academy of Sciences, and a Trustee of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In Forbes' The World's Billionaire's List of 2010 he was listed in 93rd place with an estimated fortune of $7.5 billion.