He is the oligarch’s oligarch: a self-made man who used ingenuity, hard work and doggedness to climb from obscurity to become a billionaire with unrivalled political connections.
Oleg Deripaska first hit the headlines in Britain in 2008 when it was revealed he had held controversial undisclosed meetings with both George Osborne, then shadow chancellor, and Peter Mandelson, the New Labour grandee, with a well-publicised meeting on his yacht causing a backlash for both politicians.
Now it is his relationship with Vladimir Putin that is under scrutiny.
Born in 1968 in a region west of Moscow, and raised mostly by his grandparents on a farm near southern Russia’s Black Sea coast, he discovered a...