Vladimir Viktorovich Vinogradov was the owner and president of Inkombank, one of the largest banks in 90s' Russia. Considered one of Russia's oligarchs, he was ranked 12th in the list of the top 20 richest Russians in 1996. His bank underwent bankruptcy following the 1998 Russian financial crisis.
Life
Vladimir Viktorovich Vinogradov was born in 1955 in Ufa, Bashkiria. He lost his father when he was a child, and grew up in modest circumstances. He graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute with a degree in mechanical engineering. From 1979 until 1985 he worked at the Atommash factory in Volgodonsk as a construction engineer. He took a leading role in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth organisation, and was given the opportunity to continue his studies at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics, becoming the Soviet industrial bank Promstroibank's chief economist in 1988. In October 1988, he founded one of Russia's first wholly private commercial bank, Inkombank, also called the Moscow Innovative Commercial Bank, which eventually became Russia's largest private bank. Vinogradov joined Boris Yeltsin’s business advisory council, being one of the so called “seven bankers”, the financial group around Yeltsin. In 1997 he was the vice president of the Association of Russian Bankers. In April 1992 Vinogradov declared his support for Moscow's Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and the city government, defending them from accusations of corruption. The declaration was endorsed by other figures on the financial scene, including Vladimir Gusinsky, Leonid Nevzlin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who formed an influential economic group known as PPI, which Vinogradov led from 1993. Although one of Yeltsin's supporters in the years after the October 1993 crisis and an adviser to the Economics Ministry, Vinogradov criticised the government in 1995 of following too rigid an economic policy and said that the conflict in Chechnya was damaging the economy. In May 1996 Inkombank, with reportedly $4 billion in assets, raised $20 million in Russia's first unsecured syndicated loan from Western banks. In November 1996 Vinogradov won a libel suit against the newspaper Kommersant and Russian TV controlled by Boris Berezovsky, who had spread rumors that Inkombank couldn't pay its interbank borrowings, and that a Central Bank inspection report implied that the bank was near collapse, a claim denied by the Central Bank. In December 1996 Vinogradov established the first American depositary receipt for a Russian bank in the US stock market, being one of the few Russian banks that adhered to US accounting standards. In February 1997 he reportedly predicted that 1,000 banks in Russia, about half the total, were going to disappear within the next five years, most of them going bankrupt. According to CBS Money Watch, Vinogradov had a reputation for openness and fair dealing as well as for making impulsive and politically unwise statements. He had some important international connections, such as London's Rothschild Bank, and US consulting firmMcKinsey, which had devised a business plan for him. Inkombank also had an industrial portfolio that included a minority stake in jet-fighter maker Sukhoi and control of aluminum fabricator Samara Metallurgical. In 1995 Vinogradov acquired the Babayev chocolate factory, in Russia's first hostile stock market takeover, a deal praised for its transparency and fairness: Even after he had gained 50 per cent of the shares, he offered the same terms to minority shareholders. On the other hand, Inkombank was accused of having been infiltrated by Russian organized crime figures tied to Semion Mogilevich in 1994. In May 1998 Chase Manhattan Corp. arranged its first commercial paper program for a Russian bank with a $50 million program for Inkombank, reported to have $5.1 billion of assets. In summer 1998, during the Russian financial crisis, when the government defaulted, the bank suffered huge losses, and was granted $100 million in credit by the Russian Central Bank, but only survived temporarily. Vinogradov resigned, and two days later, on 29 October 1998, the Russian Central Bank revoked the bank's licence, explaining that “Inkombank had taken excessive risks ahead of the August 17 devaluation and that its obligations had shrunk its asset base.” The bank was declared bankrupt on 1 February 2000. There were accusations that the management had illegally transferred funds from the bank to subsidiaries outside of Russia. Vinogradov had two daughters and one son with his wife Liudmila. He died of a stroke after a long illness in Moscow on June 29, 2008, aged 52.
