Kirill Alexandrovich Dmitriev (; born 12 April 1975) is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund created by the Russian government to co-invest in the Russian economy. His wife Natalia Popova, a deputy director of the NGO Innopraktika Foundation, works for and is a very close friend of Putin's younger daughter Katerina Tikhonova. In February 2022, both Kirill Dmitriev and RDIF were sanctioned by the United States Treasury, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Under Mr. Dmitriev's leadership RDIF claims to be the first state owned Russian company to call for diplomatic solution and peace in Ukraine.
Early life
Kirill Dmitriev was born in 1975 in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Kirill Dmitriev was one of the first Russian exchange students from Ukraine who came to a host family in New Hampshire in 1989. When Dmitriev was 14, he was sent to live with friends of his parents in California, where the host family and Dmitriev convinced administrators at Foothill College to enroll him. In two years, he transferred to Stanford University, from which he holds a BA in economics with honors and distinction. He continued his education at Harvard Business School, where he completed the MBA program as a Baker scholar.
Career
Dmitriev worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in New York and a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, Moscow, and Prague, before returning to Russia in 2000. He was an associate at private equity fund Delta Private Equity Partners from 2002 to 2007, while also working for The U.S. Russia Investment Fund. He served as the President of Icon Private Equity from 2007 to 2010.
During his career, Dmitriev worked on the sale of DeltaBank to General Electric, DeltaCredit Bank to Société Générale, CTC Media shares to Fidelity Investments, National Cable Networks to Basic Element, CompuLink to three investment funds, TV3 to Prof-Media, and NTC to Bank Rossiya.
Russian Direct Investment Fund
In 2011 he was appointed as CEO of a newly created Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a sovereign wealth fund to make equity co-investments in Russia companies. His mission has been described as "to change the face of Russian capitalism" and make the Russian economy less dependent on the petroleum industry by "overcoming western funds’ reluctance to invest in a country many viewed as corrupt, prone to state meddling and plagued by a law-of-the-jungle legal system".
Under his leadership, RDIF has successfully invested with foreign partners in more than 90 projects totaling more than 2.1 trillion rubles and covering 95% of the regions of the Russian Federation. RDIF has established joint strategic partnerships with leading international co-investors from more than 15 countries including Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Italy, France. Foreign partners have included BlackRock, One Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank.
Fighting COVID-19
In 2020 Kirill Dmitriev focused RDIF on combatting the novel coronavirus infection through investing in most promising solutions in testing, drugs, vaccines:
In March, 2020 RDIF invested in the production of unique Russian-Japanese testing system to detect COVID-19 within 30 mins (produced under EMG brand). More than 13 million testing kits were sold by RDIF and its partners abroad. The system is being used in all major airports of Moscow: Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo. In March, 2020 RDIF and Russian pharmaceutical company ChemRar Group agreed to create a JV aimed at the production of Favipiravir-based drug Avifavir (generic version of the Japanese drug Avigan, which was proven to be effective by the Phase 3 clinical trials of Fujifilm Toyama Chemical 5 months after RDIF and ChemRar registered Avifavir in Russia. Avifavir was the first anti-COVID-19 drug officially registered in Russia. It has been exported to more than 15 countries worldwide. RDIF invested in the production in Russia and abroad of the Sputnik V vaccine, which became the first registered anti-COVID-19 vaccine in the world. The vaccine is based on the proven and safe platform of human adenoviral vectors.
Dmitriev has been critical of the British COVID-19 vaccine research efforts, repeatedly referring to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as the "monkey vaccine", as the studies involved a modified version of the virus that infected chimpanzees. Dmitriev stopped this after The Times accused him of acting as part of a co-ordinated disinformation campaign against the British research efforts.