A 35-Year-Old Tycoon Targets the Country Where He's Sanctioned
NDTV
Turlov controls almost three-quarters of Freedom and has a net worth of about $2.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Timur Turlov was sleeping in a hotel room in Dubai when his wife woke him to tell him his home country had invaded Ukraine.
The 35-year-old founder of US-listed Freedom Holding Corp. had come to the Gulf to discuss how to develop business with the heads of his regional offices, including those from Russia and Ukraine. The Feb. 24 attack changed all that.
Instead, his team had to figure out how to evacuate staff from Freedom's Ukraine office and get rid of the Russian business that generated about a quarter of the company's revenue, which hit more than $350 million in the financial year through March 2021.
"It wasn't clear where the problems might come from: what move could lead to some irrevocable consequence,'' Turlov said in a recent interview from his office overlooking a ski jump complex in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city. A US delisting or sanctions would have been particularly negative, he added.
