A month ago, Vladimir Potanin sat alongside the world’s financial and business elite on the advisory board of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and among the trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
Those power circles, which included Tom Hill, the former Blackstone Inc. executive, and billionaires from Brazil and India, were cultivated over decades. Now, they’re closed off to Potanin, Russia’s richest man. Over the past two weeks, he’s dropped off both boards.
The nickel and palladium magnate, who is among the few original oligarchs who remain active in business in Russia, hasn’t been sanctioned. Potanin, with a net worth of $24.5 billion, is referred to as the mastermind behind the controversial loans-for-shares program that led to the privatization of natural resource companies after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
For much of the past two decades, U.S. cultural institutions in the arts, non-profits and education were willing to look past the history of how billionaires with ties to Russia amassed their fortunes. In Potanin’s case, he was seen publicly years ago with Vladimir Putin, including in an exhibition hockey game with the Russian leader in Sochi.
Potanin, 61, now stands out as an example of how quickly Western bastions of social capital are turning amid a pressure campaign on Putin to end the Ukraine war. While Russia’s elite have a number of ways to reshape their fortunes in response to the fallout, regaining their place in these institutions will likely prove a tougher task.
“The reputational risk right now of keeping an oligarch on an institutional board such as CFR is just too great,” said David Szakonyi, co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, which has researched the philanthropy of billionaires whose fortunes are tied to Russia. “It’s going to be very difficult for Potanin to win back his former positions.”
Potanin, president of MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, which accounts for about 40% of global palladium output and 10% of refined nickel, did not reply to interview requests.
The former first deputy prime minister of energy and economy under Boris Yeltsin spoke publicly last week for the first time since the Ukraine invasion, criticizing Russia’s retaliation against international penalties.
“We have to look respectable and composed, and our efforts should be directed not at ‘slamming the door’ but at maintaining Russia’s economic position in markets that we’ve been mastering for so long,” Potanin said on Norilsk Nickel’s Telegram channel on March 11.
Potanin, along with oligarchs Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman, are among the billionaires with links to Russia who have given more than $300 million to hundreds of the most prestigious U.S. non-profit institutions in the two decades ending in 2020, according to the Anti-Corruption Data Collective. At least $100 million went to more than 100 organizations in New York, data provided to Bloomberg show.