A Russian oligarch has been ordered by a Swiss court to pay his ex-wife £2.68 billion.
Dmitry Rybolovlev, 47, met his ex-wife Elena Rybolovleva 30 years ago when they were both students. The pair were married for 24 years, during which time Mr Rybolovlev amassed a great fortune from his shares in a successful Russian fertiliser business, Uralkali.
The couple have one child together, a daughter who is in her teens.
Ms Rybolovleva filed for divorce in 2008 and the couple have been battling over the divorce settlement for 6 year. Ms Rybolovleva stated in the petition that the reason she wanted to divorce her husband was that she could no longer stand his infidelities. She went on to describe lavish parties where her husband had shared some ‘young conquests with his friends, and other oligarchs’.
However, the Swiss court has now ordered Mr Rybolovlev to pay his ex-wife a very precise 4,020,555,987 Swiss francs and 20 centimes. This is £2,681,297,538 and 78 pence – an estimate of half the Russian oligarch’s entire fortune.
Mr Rybolovlev’s fortune had been invested in a number of properties, trusts and companies, making calculating his precise wealth very difficult. During their marriage the couple bought numerous properties including a $95million Palm Beach, Florida, home purchased from Donald Trump, a £12million Hawaii mansion he bought from the Hollywood star, Will Smith, and La Belle Epoque penthouse in Monaco, where he lives, for which he paid £178 million.
He bought the Greek island of Skorpios from the Onassis dynasty last year for a reported £100 million for his daughter, Anna. The Island was the location for Aristotle Onassis’s wedding to the former US First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, in 1968.
Ms Rybolovleva currently lives in a lakeside mansion in Geneva.