Yuri Gushchin is a Russian businessman who has a net worth of $1.6 billion. Back in the Soviet era, Yuri Gushchin was operating as an underground producer of consumer goods, particularly candy. In the 1980s, when the perestroika movement in the union was in full swing, he became one of the first Russians to legalize his business.
Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gushchin went on to found Guta-Bank, in Moscow. By 1993, it started collaborating with Gosincor, a state-owned bank founded by President Boris Yeltsin to draw foreign investments and headed by Yeltsin’s longtime friend and right-hand man Yuri Petrov. Right after the 1998 Russian financial crisis, he purchased controlling stakes in some of the biggest confectionery factories in Moscow at the time and thus he established Obyedinennye Konditery. As for the buildings of his former Krasny Oktyabr candy company, he leases them to billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s Snob magazine, Mikhail Abyzov’s Digital October educational center and Alexander Mamut’s Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. In 2008, he purchased the Coral Strand Hotel in the Seychelles, previously owned by British Airways, and next to it, he has just finished the construction of a new high-end hotel, Savoy Resort and Spa.
| Net Worth: | $1.6 Billion |