The billionaire has been embroiled in court battles throughout the last 20 years, including allegations of blackmail (a London court dismissed the case against him in 2012), bribery (he admitted to paying out billions for political favours in 2008) and unproven accusations loan fraud.
Now his name is among those the British government is being urged to sanction.
He has also been questioned over his links to the Russian president, with him last year denying in court he was Putin’s ‘cashier’ in the West – but is still seen as one of his ‘enablers’. He is said to have been the first person to recommend Putin for president to Boris Yeltsin, before Putin assumed office in 2000.
Until recently he had mostly lived his hugely privileged life in peace, either onboard his superyachts, in his mansions or on one of the private jets that make up his £8.4billion empire. He has also found time to create a large family, including seven children – Ilya, Arina, Sofia, Arkadiy, Anna, Aaron and Leah – from two of his three ex-wives.
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But he has now found himself in a scramble to sell assets before they are frozen after Putin invaded Ukraine, which swiftly brought calls – so far unheeded – for Abramovich to be sanctioned and have his west London football team stripped from him.
The businessman, 55, had a remarkable rise to make his billions, having been born penniless in Saratov, south west Russia. Both his parents died when he was young, and he was instead raised by his grandparents in Komi, Siberia, from the age of four. Both his grandparents Vasily and Faina, were from Ukraine and fled during the war.
His mother, Irina, died at the age of 28 from fatal blood poisoning shortly after Abramovich was born after she fell pregnant again. His father Arkady threw himself into work, with his young son going to live with his grandparents.
But in May 1969, Arkady was crushed by a crane at a construction site. Both his legs were badly injured, and he died a few days after the accident. Soon after, Abramovich went to live with his uncle, 200 miles from Moscow.
Despite his early loss, the billionaire – who is Jewish and holds Russian, Israeli and Portuguese citizenship – had no complaints about his childhood when speaking about it in the past. ‘In your childhood, you can’t compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference,’ he once said.
Abramovich first starting making money flogging plastic dolls on a market stall after dropping out of two colleges in the late 1980s. According to a biography Roman Abramovich: The Billionaire, he still employs a woman who worked for him back then. He went on to sell rubber ducks from his Moscow apartment.
In 1987 after Abramovich served brief stint in the Soviet army, the parents of his first wife Olga Lysova gave the Russian 2,000 rubles as a wedding present. This allowed him to expand the range of products he sold to deodorants and perfumes.
His first move into making serious money came during the perestroika – meaning openness – reforms as the Soviet Union started to wind down under Mikhail Gorbachev. The changes loosened the regime’s grip on businesses, meaning oligarchs could rise by making their firms legal and buy up state-owned companies.
Abramovich has been accused of using ruthless determination to become one of the richest men in the world before he was 40. He was arrested in 1992, having allegedly used false documents to get 55 tankers of diesel, before the charges were dropped.
He said of the incident in 2011: ‘I have never falsified any documents. None of the people close to me has ever faked a document.’
He added: ‘If backdating documents is something that is not very ethical, then perhaps we could be accused of that. This practice existed in Russia and, for sure, we must have done it. In the course of this case we say that certain documents have been signed two days early, or not.’
His fortune boomed when he linked up with Boris Berezovsky, who run the national car dealer firm Lada, but who was also close with President Boris Yeltsin. It gave the rising businessman key access, which was pivotal to making huge sums in post-Soviet Russia, and he even lived in a flat in the Kremlin.
It is even said that Abramovich was the man who first recommended Vladimir Putin to Yeltsin as his successor as Russia’s president. When Putin first formed his cabinet as Prime Minister in 1999, Abramovich interviewed all the candidates before they were given approval.
In the following years, he would remain one of Putin’s closest allies, and in 2007, Putin consulted with Abramovich on who should be his own successor. Dmitry Medvedev – who served as president from 2008 to 2012 before Putin returned to the role – was also personally recommended by Abramovich.
When the USSR’s industry was carved up at the top table, Abramovich was there to make his first few billions – mainly by buying up oil company Sibneft.
Berezovsky and Abramovich purchased the firm for just £100million using the controversial loans-for-shares program – when it was estimated to be worth around £600million.
It was the starting blocks for the tycoon’s huge wealth, with him raking back around £1.8billion from the sale of Sibneft.
The bulk of Abramovich’s UK wealth is to be found in Evraz, a steel and mining giant listed on the London stock market, which he is the largest shareholder.
Aside from business, Abramovich also worked in politics, becoming the governor of the far eastern Chukotka region in 2000 – after winning 92 per-cent of the vote – and pumped £180million into it.
He first came on the radar to ordinary Britons when he bought Chelsea football club in 2003, and put enough money on the table to help them compete.
He transformed the team from outside challengers to a Premier League giant with the help of Jose Mourinho and huge signings such as Didier Drogba.
Despite being highly secretive and preferring a life out of the spotlight, the billionaire has still led a glitzy lifestyle, with superyachts and private planes aplenty.
His two jets, which have two pilots reportedly on £160,000 a year, are personalised inside with a study and supposedly a bedroom with a mirror on the ceiling.
Once asked if the mirror helped improve his sex life, Abramovich replied: ‘No, but it does allow me to shave in bed.’
He also had three Eurocopter helicopters, two of them that were based in England, which meant he could avoid congestion in London. The helicopter pilots were also reportedly paid around £90,000 per year.
The billionaire is said to be less keen on road travel, but still boasted a range of stunning cars including a Ferrari, two Maybach limos, a Porche and a Rolls-Royce.
Meanwhile his property portfolio was also extensive – and expansive. In London, he created a five-storey town house in Belgravia by knocking six flats into one, making the house worth around £150million.
There was a £35million house in St Tropez, south of France, and he also owns homes in Russia, Sardinia, France, the West Indies and the US.
Abramovich lost a number of properties during his 2007 divorce from his second wife Irina, with whom he has five children.
She bagged a £30million home on the Riviera called Chateau de la Croe as well as an estate in Sussex called Fyning Hill, which Abramovich had bought for £18million.
She fared better than his first wife, Olga, who he married when he was still a penniless student back in the Soviet Union.
When Abramovich, then 20, spotted Olga, a 23-year-old daughter of a high-ranking government diplomat, across a crowded restaurant in Ukhta in Russia’s Komi Republic in 1987, he was shy.
Afraid Olga would reject him, he sent a friend over to ask the geology student to dance. They later married and went on to share a one-bed flat in a tower block with Olga’s daughter Nastya – from a previous relationship.
But when Olga’s marriage to Abramovich ended in 1989 – amid him working long hours to make his fortune – he gave her only enough money to live on for two years.
He rented another flat for her further out of Moscow, but on the understanding she and her daughter would later move back into the flat on Tsvetnoi Boulevard because Olga wanted Nastya to attend a better school near there.
Abramovich soon shacked up with Irina, a London-based former Aeroflot stewardess who wed the Russian tycoon in 1991 as the USSR crumbled.
The then Ms Malandina met him when the Chelsea owner travelled on an Aeroflot plane when she worked as a flight attendant. Her father had died when she was two, and she grew up in poverty in the Soviet era.
During their marriage he switched from being a powerful but reclusive figure in Russia’s post-Soviet rollercoaster business and political world to becoming a household name in the West as owner of the London football club.
Their life together was compared to living in a ‘gilded cage’ with security guards who formerly worked for Russian and British intelligence.
They parted on good terms in 2007 – with their divorce settlement a closely guarded secret but thought to be £150million – and did not speak ill of each other.
Abramovich married his third wife, the magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in 2008 but they divorced in 2017 and she is now with billionaire shipping heir Stavros Niarchos.
Dasha had son Aaron Alexander and daughter Leah Lou with her ex-husband and said they were committed to jointly raising their children together.
Court documents filed in New York showed Abrahmovich and Zhukova finalising their divorced in 2017 showed the settlement included over £90million worth of property to Dasha – including a Manhattan mansion. More recently he has been romantically linked to ballerina Diana Vishneva.
During his marriages Abramovich also had to fight off a number of controversies that threatened to bring him down.
In 2011 the High Court heard he had used well-connected oligarch Boris Berezovsky as his ‘political godfather’ to help him conduct business deals in a country where police were ‘corrupt’ and courts ‘open to manipulation’.
The court heard the Chelsea owner believed it was his ‘moral obligation’ to hand Mr Berezovsky £1.3billion to fund his lavish lifestyle.
He gave his former friend the cash because he felt it was part of the ‘code of honour’ that had replaced the rule of law in Russia after the collapse of communism, it was alleged. But Abramovich won the case in 2012.
The judge said the claimant was ‘an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes’.
Meanwhile in 2008 he was accused of bribery, with court papers reportedly showing he admitted paying billions for political favours and protection fees for shares of Russia’s oil and aluminium assets.
There was also a claim in Switzerland he had links through a former firm to using a multi-billion pound loan from the IMF as a slush fund.
In 2005, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said it would suing him for £9million but he said the loan had already been paid back.
More recently, Abramovich has been linked to controversial Israeli settler organisations. A BBC probe found the businessman controlled companies that donated around £74million to Elad in Jerusalem.
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