The New Yorker has gone to town on Len Blavatnik with a 12-page profile. The Ukrainian-American billionaire is owner of a house in Kensington Palace Gardens, bought in 2004 for £41 million, which makes the Russian embassy nearby “look like a humble dacha,” notes the magazine.
Blavatnik made his first roubles in the aluminium trade in the old Soviet Union. Then there was oil through TNK-BP and now plastics, or more specifically CDs, with the purchase of Warner Music. But the 56-year-old also wants to be seen as un homme serieux. Four years ago he gave £75 million for the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford. “A few alumni criticised Oxford for taking the money,” says the New Yorker, drily, adding that Stuart Leasor, an Oxford alumnus who advised BP in its 2008 battle with its Russian partner in TNK-BP, has said: “Having the Blavatnik School of Government sounds rather like having a henhouse sponsored by a fox.”
Former BP boss Lord Browne, former US President Bill Clinton and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney are all on the school’s advisory board. One would have thought their judgment sound.
