SECHIN, I. I.

A Soviet military translator (Portuguese) who served in Mozambique and Angola in the 1980s. Met Putin in 1991, when both worked for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak; Sechin was Putin's deputy in the city's foreign-relations committee. Followed Putin to the Kremlin in 1999 and has held some form of formal power continuously since — first as deputy chief of staff (1999–2008), then deputy prime minister (2008–2012), and from 2012 as CEO of Rosneft, Russia's state oil company.

Sechin is widely understood to have been the political driver of the 2003 Yukos affair — the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia's richest man, and the dismemberment of his Yukos oil company. Yukos's main production unit was sold at a forced auction in 2004 to a previously unknown shell company and re-acquired by Rosneft within days, beginning Rosneft's transformation from a minor state asset into the world's largest publicly listed oil producer. The 2013 acquisition of TNK-BP completed the consolidation.

Documented personal assets include the 86 m yacht «Princess Olga» (Lürssen, 2013), a Barvikha estate of ≈ 5,000 m², a second 137 m yacht «St Princess Olga» (Lürssen, 2021, ≈ €600 mn) revealed by OCCRP / Forbes, and the historic Villa Altachiara on the coast of Sardinia (≈ €30 mn, frozen by EU sanctions in Italy after 2022, La Repubblica). Rosneft stopped publishing individual executive compensation in 2018; outside estimates of Sechin's annual remuneration range from $10 mn to $20 mn USD per year — among the highest CEO packages in global oil despite Rosneft's market cap collapsing more than threefold under sanctions. He is on EU, UK, U.S., Canadian, Swiss and Australian sanctions lists.