The two became fast friends and are minting money together.
In 1989, Farhad Moshiri was an ÈmigrÈ in London pulling a paycheck at Deloitte & Touche when he met Alisher Usmanov, generally believed to be Russia’s current richest man.
Moshiri, who now owns 5 percent of Usmanov’s “http://metalloinvest.com/eng/metalloinvest/about-us/company-profile/”Metalloinvest Holding, Russia’s largest miner of iron ore, and 15 percent of London’s Arsenal soccer team, is worth at least $1.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Usmanov, 58, rewarded Moshiri, 56, for years of service as an adviser and confidant in 2008, granting him a 10 percent stake in Gallagher Holding Ltd., through which Usmanov controls Metalloinvest.
“He was consulting me for decades on different deals and exercised his option, fairly getting the stake,” Usmanov said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg from Moscow.
Metalloinvest accounts for the bulk of Usmanov’s fortune, which has swelled to more than $20 billion through timely bets on technology companies including Facebook and Groupon, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s richest people. Metalloinvest is worth at least $16 billion, valuing Moshiri’s share at a minimum of $800 million.
For Moshiri, the road to riches started with a revolution. “My parents fled Iran in February 1979, just before the Iranian revolution,” Moshiri, now a British citizen, said. “My father was an army doctor who trained as a pathologist and later became a senior military judge. My mother came from Iran’s leading publishing house, Kayhan.”
The billionaire studied accounting at the University of London and eventually went to work for Deloitte & Touche. He said he met Usmanov through a mutual friend, Masud Alikhani, when Usmanov was in London.
“I was very taken at the time by his intelligence and the speed at which he absorbed complex ideas,” Moshiri said.
The feeling was mutual, said Usmanov, who was born in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. “We became friends almost at once,” Usmanov said.
One of Moshiri’s accounts at Deloitte & Touche was Middle-sex Holdings, a London-registered investment company in which Usmanov and Alikhani held shares. In 1993, Middlesex hired Moshiri and within a few years made him an executive director. Through the years, Moshiri began earning Usman-ov’s trust by analyzing—and challenging—his investment ideas.
Middlesex, among other things, bought and sold aluminum produced at the TadAZ smelter in Tajikistan, said Alex-ander Vladislavlev, a former deputy foreign minister for the Soviet Union who sat on the company’s board.
“It was basically the first London-listed company that had Russians as shareholders,” Vladislavlev said in an interview in Moscow.
Middlesex was also acquiring assets in the former Soviet Union, including by 2000 about 8 percent in the Oskolskiy steel mill in central Russia, which is now a Metalloinvest unit.
“With time, Moshiri actually became my financial mentor,” Usmanov said. “I appreciate his honesty and his encyclopedic knowledge of finance and investments, although some of my most successful investments I did contrary to his opinion.”
In 2003, for example, Usmanov started buying shares in Corus Group Plc, a British steelmaker now part of Tata Steel. Moshiri, he said, was “strictly against” the move. Even so, Moshiri “brilliantly led this deal through,” Usmanov said.
Under Moshiri’s management, Usmanov’s Gallagher spent about $300 million to gain 13.4 percent of Corus before selling the stake in 2005 for more than $600 million.
“Moshiri also didn’t believe in the prospects for investments in Facebook and Groupon,” said Usmanov.
Moshiri has been chairman of Metalloinvest since 2006 and represents Usmanov on the boards of some of the other companies Usmanov owns shares in, including OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining company, and OAO Megafon, the second- largest mobile-phone operator in Russia.
The partners also share a love of soccer, particularly Arsenal. They bought 15 percent of the London team in 2007 and have since increased that stake to 30 percent. Moshiri is an equal partner in the investment, according to Arsenal’s website. A 15 percent stake in the club has a market value of about $238 million.
