Michael Cherney (, , also Mikhail Chernoy, Mikhail Semenovitch Chorny or Mikhail Chernoi; born 16 January 1952) is an Uzbek-born Israeli entrepreneur and industrialist. He is known for his significant role in the 1990s aluminium industry in Russia, and his business ventures in Israel. He is also the founder of the Michael Cherney Foundation and a sponsor of The Intelligence Summit.
Biography
Cherney grew up in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR, in a Jewish family whose father was a book-keeper and an engineer, the eldest of three sons. At the age of fourteen, Cherney started working, as he joined his father on moonlighting jobs. After high school, he was drafted into the Soviet Army and attended a technical college. Later, his athletic pursuits – boxing and football – led to employment in sports administration.
In the early 1990s Cherney immigrated to Israel but kept close ties to Bulgaria, where he had bought a leading newspaper, a top football team and Bulgaria's only mobile phone company, Mobiltel. In August 2000 Bulgarian authorities denounced what they said were his ties to foreign criminal rackets and expelled him, saying he could not return to Bulgaria for 10 years.
Furthermore, the United States has "denied Cherney a visa since 1999 because of alleged ties to the Russian mafia, according to St. Petersburg Times in Florida".
Cherney is wanted on an Interpol international arrest warrant on allegations of money laundering and organised crime, but in June 2010 The Jerusalem Post reported that Cherney is preparing an application to contest it before the European Union Court of Human Rights.
In August 2010 the Israeli TV Channel Two aired a short program about the most expensive and lavish wedding ceremony in Israel until that time, costing 20 million ILS (about 5 million US dollars). The program revealed that the bride was Cherny's daughter, that the wedding was paid by him and that Israeli ministers and members of parliament (Knesset) of Russian origin attended.
Business interests
TWG and founding of the Russian aluminium industry
Lev Cherny and Boris Berezovsky transactions were through the Bank of New York.
Cherney, together with his brother Lev Cherney and UK metals traders David and Simon Reuben, founded Trans-World Group (TWG) – the first and largest private company in Russia, which produced aluminium and sold it on Western markets. BusinessWeek reports that the brothers "were known for their rough style of doing business". Sam Kislin was a partner of Michael Cherney in Trans World.
In 1997, Russia's Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov linked both the Cherney brothers and Reuben brothers to the Izmaylovskaya mafia which was led by Anton Malevsky in Israel, but, in March 1998, Boris Yeltsin removed Kulikov from his post.
According to a 7 May 2000 Top Secret magazine () article by Yulia Latynina, the Cherny brothers krysha () or "roof" were the Izmailovskaya mafia, Oleg Soskovets (), and Alexander Korzhakov ().
In 1994, TWG was drawn into a government inquiry into the theft of more than $US100 million from Russia's central bank by a number of separate criminal groups during the early 1990s. In an article on TWG, Fortune magazine reported: "That a theft occurred is not in dispute, nor is the fact that the Cherneys ended up with a piece of the stolen money and used it to partially fund Trans World's startup phase in 1992.... The inquiry's objective was to determine whether the Cherneys knew the funds were indeed stolen."
In an attempt to clean up its reputation and refute allegations of questionable business practices, the Reuben brothers hired Mayer Brown & Platt, a US-based law firm. Terrence Burke, an investigator employed by the law firm and former acting head of the DEA, recommended that the Reubens sever their ties with Cherney after the FBI told him that "it believed Michael himself was an organised crime figure." As a result, Michael was paid $US400 million "just to go away" while his brother Lev remained with the company.
In August 2001 a Fortune article notes, "the prosecutor's office in Düsseldorf notified the Reuben brothers that it had terminated its probe into alleged money laundering, saying 'I hereby confirm expressly that there is no remaining suspicion of money laundering or any other criminal actions.'" However, the same article states that the Kroll report "doesn't discuss an essential part of the story", nor does it "explore the complex business and financial relationships in Russia between the Reubens and Lev and Michael Chernoy."