Dmitry Rybolovlev

Rybolovlev was born in 1966. Rybolovlev's parents were doctors and he himself graduated from the Perm Medical Institute as a cardiologist in 1990. He then started to work in the cardiology emergency Service. During his student years, Rybolovlev married Elena, one of his fellow students, and in 1989 their first daughter Ekaterina was born. In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev had started the perestroika that eventually led to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the great economic shocks that followed. During this time Rybolovlev entered the Business world.

Rybolovlev married Elena Rybolovleva in 1987 in Perm, Russia, and together they have had two daughters, Ekaterina, born in 1989, and Anna, born in 2001.

The 1990s were a difficult time in Russian history, as the country transitioned its economy through privatization. During this time, Rybolovlev became concerned about the safety of his family so he moved them to Switzerland, while he stayed in Russia to do Business. In September 1995, Evgeny Panteleymonov, Director of Neftekhimik, a company partly owned by Rybolovlev, was shot by a killer at the staircase of his own house. In May 1996, Rybolovlev was officially indicted and arrested for the contract killing of Panteleymonov. According to the prosecution, Rybolovlev himself, "without a corresponding license", purchased in August 1995 two pistols that he kept and carried, and later gave to the killers "for the premeditated murder of Panteleymonov".

In 1992 Rybolovlev became the first businessman in the Perm region to obtain a Russian Ministry of Finance certificate entitling him to deal with securities, and in the same year opened an investment company. In 1994 Rybolovlev founded a bank, acquired shareholdings in several of Perm’s industrial enterprises and joined their boards.

In 1995, Rybolovlev sold most of his shareholdings and focused in enterprises operating in the potash industry, in particular, Uralkali.

Rybolovlev was however set free 11 months later, after the only living witness recanted his testimony and the intervention in Rybolovlev's favor of Andrey Pokhmelkin, brother of Vladimir Pokhmelkin, a prominent congressman representing Perm District in the Duma, as well as of local Governor Gennady Igumnov. In 1997 Rybolovlev was acquitted by courts of law at three levels, including the Presidium of the Supreme Court.

Over the next 15 years Rybolovlev focused on developing Uralkali and eventually built it into a major global enterprise. According to the Russian Business newspaper Vedomosti, by 2000 he had consolidated his controlling interest in the company and begun to reform and develop it. He completely changed the management team and set as a priority the achievement of an increase in labor productivity. According to Forbes, from 2000 through 2007 labor productivity at Uralkali grew by 2.5 times.

According to Reuters in 2005 Uralkali and Belarusian potash Producer Belaruskali combined their trade flows via a single trader: Belarusian Potash Company (BPC), of which Rybolovlev became chief executive. Over the next three years, potash prices increased more than fivefold. The price increase and the creation of BPC both had a transformational impact on Uralkali. In 2007 Uralkalis IPO on the London Stock Exchange coincided with the sharply rising global potash prices and was therefore described by the financial media as one of the most successful Russian IPOs ever.

The reasons that led to the 2006 catastrophe remain controversial. Some sources claimed that Uralkali failed to undertake all the necessary work in order to fill the holes in the mines, which may have directly caused the appearance of the sinkholes. According to the local newspaper Inaya Gazeta, Rybolovlev, motivated by the Desire to save money, decided to split in two the budget allocated to the holes filling, which resulted in an insufficient filling of the mines chambers.

Elena Rybolovleva filed for divorce on December 22, 2008, citing in her divorce petition the "serial infidelity" of her husband, who used to "share his young conquests with his friends, and other oligarchs” on his private yacht, and being "sick to the back teeth of his fondness of other women". At the same occasion, Elena Rybolovleva officially asked the Geneva State prosecutor for protection from Rybolovlev.

In 2010 Rybolovlev was awarded the Order of St. Seraphim of Sarov I degree by Patriarch Kirill for funding the restoration of the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God in Zachatyevsky Convent.

In December 2011, the trust bought a 10-room, 626 m (6,740 sq ft) apartment at 15 Central Park West in New York City for $88 million, from Joan Weill, the wife of Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup. This was a record price for an apartment in the city at the time of its purchase. In 2011, Rybololev also bought a $20 million property in Kauai, Hawaii, from the American actor Will Smith.

In June 2012, Green Patrol, a Russian environmental NGO, listed Uralkali as one of the top 100 polluters in Russia, based on information gathered during the previous years. An expedition organised into the Perm Krai by the same NGO in 2010, when Rybolovlev was still the company's owner, revealed that Uralkali's sinks contained at least 16 harmful elements (including zinc and ammonium), exceeding the maximum permissible levels by 1,850 times. According to Green Patrol's President Roman Pukalov, Uralkali failed to fully disclose a complete list of harmful elements that it routinely rejected into the local river Kama. Roman Pukalov described Kama water as "very polluted", and declared that small rivers around Berezniki had in fact turned into brine, something he had "never seen anywhere else". Furthermore, Uralkali's environmental spending under Rybolovlev was exceptionally low.

In April 2013, Ekaterina Rybolovlev's trust bought a group of companies from the Greek heiress Athina Onassis Roussel, their assets included the 74 acre Greek island of Skorpios and its smaller islet, Sparti. The sale price had earlier been reported as $154 million.

In May 2014, the divorce made headlines when a Geneva court awarded Rybolovlev's ex-wife a record settlement of $4.8 billion. June 2015 saw a major turn in the case, however, after Rybolovlev's lawyers successfully appealed the 2014 ruling. The Geneva court reversed the earlier decision, ruling that Rybolovleva's settlement be reduced to 564 million Swiss francs, significantly less than the 800 million Swiss francs that Rybolovlev had repeatedly offered her. Of particular significance was the decision of the court to confirm the validity of the family trust structures, which were set up long before the divorce process began; and to apply a rate of capital appreciation to matrimonial assets only up until the time of the divorce. The correct application of Swiss matrimonial law thereby led to the massive settlement reduction decided by the court, Rybolovlev's lawyers said.

In the Forbes billionaires list for 2015 Rybolovlev was ranked the 156th richest person in the world with a net worth of $8.5 billion.

In December 2016 the Football Leaks scandal revealed that Dmitry Rybolovlev and football agent Jorge Mendes set up a secret system to illegally buy players’ shares. Using a Cyprus-based offshore investment fund named Browsefish Limited, Rybolovlev illegally manipulated the price of his own players through third-party ownerships (TPO). Rybolovlev resorted to the use of offshore companies to hide his identity, as TPO's are illegal in Europe. Investigations revealed for Example that football player Fabinho was already 48,5% owned by Rybolovlev when he was loaned to AS Monaco by Rio Ave.

Rybolovlev's art collection includes paintings by Paul Gauguin, Auguste Rodin, Amedeo Modigliani (Nude on a Blue Cushion), Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Mark Rothko (No. 6). He was also the owner of Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci until it was sold at Christie's auction house for a total cost of $450 million on 15 November 2017. In February 2015, it was reported that Rybolovlev may have been a victim of a complex art fraud allegedly perpetrated by the art dealer Yves Bouvier who was indicted on charges of fraud and complicity in money laundering. In 2016, Rybolovlev was again at the center of a controversy after it was alleged that he bought three stolen Picassos from art dealer Olivier Thomas.

Rybolovlev’s first Business project was a medical one: together with his Father, Evgeny, he set up a company called Magnetics that offered a form of alternative medical treatment using magnetic fields that Evgeny had developed. However, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union's centrally planned economy companies preferred to pay Rybolovlev’s firm with products at discounted prices rather than cash, forcing him to find buyers for these products. Often these resales of products yielded higher profits than his Medicine Business. According to Forbes Magazine, during this time Rybolovlev earned his first million dollars.