Russian oligarch who bought real estate from Trump in shady 2008 deal has allegedly invested half billion dollars in U.S. biotech

The newsletter The Bell says it’s learned that Dmitry Rybolovlev, the former owner of the Russian fertilizer company “Uralkali” and a potential suspect in Robert Mueller’s investigation, has invested more than half a billion dollars in American biotech and medtech startups over the past several years. Rybolovlev is reportedly the main investor in the $1.5-billion American private equity and venture capital firm “Apple Tree Partners.”

The Bell says it’s verified this information with three different unnamed sources: someone familiar with the firm’s work, someone who also works in U.S. biotech investments, and the director of another firm that makes similar investments in the United States.

Anton Gopka, the head of the global healthcare investment firm “ATEM Capital,” told The Bell that $1.5 billion represents a large sum of money in the biotech industry, where the average investment firm’s total volume is roughly $600 million. The annual profit margins for successful venture capital firms with similar profiles is about 20 percent, says Gopka. Rybolovlev could be taking a big risk, considering that he might be named in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia. In March 2008, after the U.S. real-estate bubble started to “lose air,” Rybolovlev bought an estate from Trump in Palm Beach for $95 million. Just four years earlier, Trump had acquired the property for a mere $41 million, according to Bloomberg.

After selling his stake in Uralkali in the summer of 2010, Rybolovlev went on something of a spending spree, buying the Monaco soccer team and Skorpios, the private Greek island that previously belonged to the billionaire Aristotle Onassis. Rybolovlev was also one of the 96 “richest Russians,” as ranked by Forbes, to be named in the U.S. Treasury Department’s “Kremlin report,” putting him at risk of direct sanctions. Four months after that report was published, Washington imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Suleiman Kerimov, and Andrey Skoch. Despite Vladimir Putin’s warnings on at least two occasions that Russian entrepreneurs should avoid investing their money in the U.S., because of potential sanctions, several very wealthy Russians have bankrolled American startups. Vekselberg, for instance, invested an estimated $1 billion.

Rybolovlev’s interest in medical technology is well known. In 2006, for example, the newspaper Vedomosti reported that he invested in several Swiss biotech companies. The magazine Forbes puts Rybolovlev’s net worth at $6.8 billion (and falling).