Moscow mobsters were among the first to learn how difficult it can be to take something away from Dmitry Kamenshchik.
It was 1992, just after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the future billionaire was raking in cash by arranging international cargo flights for a new class of shuttle trader from a rundown airport on the fringes of Moscow. That’s when two thugs stormed Kamenshchik’s office and demanded all of his money. Elena Tarshis, one of his first employees, will never forget what happened next.
“They put a gun to my son’s head,” Tarshis said in an interview. Kamenshchik, a black belt in a Burmese martial art, lunged at the attackers and together with a colleague “managed to disarm them,” she said.
That survival instinct would serve the amateur stunt pilot well over the next quarter century as he battled the mafia and then Vladimir Putin’s legal system to emerge as the sole owner of Domodedovo Airport, one of Europe’s busiest hubs and the source of his $3 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His next act is to try to reclaim the title of Russia’s biggest airport from Sheremetyevo, the main base of state-run Aeroflot PJSC, which is being renovated by billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s old judo partner.
Lehman Brothers
Kamenshchik, 49, said in an interview that after spending $3.5 billion over the last two decades to increase capacity 16-fold and lure airlines like Lufthansa and British Airways away from Sheremetyevo, he’s embarking on another $1.3 billion expansion to double maximum traffic to 60 million passengers a year, about what Frankfurt Airport currently handles. None of this would be possible without an army of more than 100 in-house lawyers who’ve parried the thousands of legal claims he’s received from state bodies over the years.
“Domodedovo is probably one of the most audited enterprises in the country,” the hyper-focused bachelor said during a two-hour interview in Bloomberg’s Moscow bureau, jotting down notes as three burly bodyguards looked on. “Our only way to survive is to carefully observe the law.”
Kamenshchik said his “aha moment” came courtesy of a U.S. company called Lehman Brothers. Then-President Boris Yeltsin’s government hired the now-collapsed Wall Street bank to draft a blueprint for resurrecting Moscow’s four main airports, which saw their collective traffic halve from 1990 to 1993. Lehman concluded that Domodedovo, 45 kilometers (28 miles) southeast of the Kremlin, was by far the most promising venue, in part because it was surrounded by fields and not Soviet residential blocks.
“This research had an impact on my destiny,” Kamenshchik said of the 188-page report, which he noticed in the office of an airport official he was negotiating with. “I realized that the main factor in the airport business is the prospect for growth, which is exactly what Domodedovo had.”
Chickens, Rockefeller