Alexander Abramov

Abramov is named in the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act released by US Treasury in January 2018.

He has made numerous strategic business acquisitions. For example, in 2007 Abramov acquired Oregon Steel Mills and Claymont Steel.

This pitched Abramov against Alfa Group, one of the most influential oligarch groups, which controlled one of the factories. While groups such as Alfa were shedding non-core assets, Abramov and his like were building empires. In June 2005 EvrazHolding was listed on the London Stock Exchange. Five months later, Abramov resigned as group president but remains a member of the board.

EvrazHolding is a product of Russia's growth since the 1998 financial crisis and Abramov is representative of the second wave of Russian magnates who went into business after the best assets had been taken. Unlike the first wave of politically connected oligarchs, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Potanin, Abramov had neither political leverage nor financial resources to help him benefit from Russia's chaotic privatisation of the 1990s.

The two factories Abramov was interested in were in bankruptcy in 1998. Salaries had not been paid for up to eight months and strikes were breaking out.

He used his contacts with Russia's steel mills, which used high-temperature technologies, and offered his services not as a scientist but as a metal trader. Trading was a popular and quick way to make money in Russia in the early 1990s. The economy was shrinking, non-payment was a chronic problem and any offer of cash from a trader was welcomed by factories. By 1997, trading was less profitable and many trading companies, including Abramov's, were owed large sums by producers. Abramov began buying factories and swapped debt for equity in the Nizhny Tagil steel mill, while also buying stakes in its rail-producing plant from other shareholders.

Alexander Grigoryevich Abramov (Russian: Александр Григорьевич Абрамов , born 1959) is a Russian former scientist who became an industrial magnate as one of the two heads of Evraz, Russia's largest steel producer. Beginning in 1998, at one point he had amassed the largest steel and iron empire in Russia, which employed 125,000 people, controlling about 22 percent of the country's total steel output with an annual turnover of $20 billion. A business partner and ally of Aleksandr Frolov and Roman Abramovich, Abramov was in January 2020 listed by Forbes as having an estimated net worth of $6.1 billion.