Russia-Ukraine crisis: Meet the British-Pakistani billionaire helping evacuate refugees to UK, Europe

British-Pakistani billionaire Mohammad Zahoor has been working the phones since the Ukraine crisis began, trying to mobilise funds and helping evacuate refugees to the UK and other parts of Europe.

Over 3.3 million people, mostly women and children, are estimated to have left their country. Zahoor and his wife Kamaliya, a Ukrainian pop singer and a former Mrs World title-holder, couldn’t just leave people in the lurch. After all, Ukraine was home.

Zahoor, a 66-year-old minigarch whose primary business interests are in the second-largest country in Europe, says his heart bleeds for Ukrainians who are “being savaged by a mindless war”. He runs a charity, Kamaliya Foundation, which is named after his wife, and it is at the forefront of humanitarian services. From his home in London located in the Hampstead neighbourhood, Zahoor — who became a British national in 2007 — looks back on his formative years and his success in Ukraine, as well as in Russia. At one point, he even owned Ukraine’s oldest English-language newspaper, Kyiv Post, and personally knew the country’s presidents “starting from Leonid Kravchuk to Leonid Kuchma”.

From Karachi to Moscow

It all started with his fortuitous tryst with the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that collapsed on the back of glasnost (openness and transparency) and perestroika (restructuring) in 1991.

Zahoor was a callow lad of 19 years from Karachi, Pakistan, when he arrived in misty and dank Moscow on an engineering scholarship offered by the Soviet education ministry in 1974.

“My parents were on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia when I got the Soviet scholarship. So, I left for Moscow in a jiffy without telling them. I was among 42 Pakistani students who got the Soviet government’s scholarship. As luck would have it, 14 stayed on in Moscow, 14 went to St. Petersburg and I was among those unlucky 14, who were put on a 32-hour arduous train journey to Donetsk (a bleak industrial city in eastern Ukraine located on the Kalmius river in the disputed area of Donetsk Oblast) in then-eastern Soviet Ukraine,” Zahoor told Khaleej Times in an exclusive interview from London.

Early accomplishments

He obtained a degree in metallurgical engineering from the erstwhile USSR and returned to Pakistan in 1980 with his first wife Olga, a Russian.

He got a job with Pakistan Steel Mills, which was built by the Russians, in Karachi, and worked as a safety engineer. He translated Russian safety manuals into English.

However, soon, Zahoor found himself in the crosshairs of Pakistani agencies — “as many as nine were after my life” — because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and “my wife was Russian”.  The agencies were in hot pursuit against Zahoor, and he quickly realised that his career prospects in Pakistan were limited because he was married to Olga.

In 1987, he took up a job with a Pakistani trading company in Moscow and showed his prowess in making money.  His employers laughed all the way to the bank, as he bought Russian steel at $100 (Dh367) a tonne and sold it abroad for $250 (Dh918.26).

“We raked in a profit of $1.5 million (Dh5.51 million) from 10,000 tonnes of steel,” he reminisced.

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Steel business

Emboldened by the early success, he ventured into a partnership business — he incorporated MetalsRussia group in Hong Kong in 1991 — with a Thai steelmaker. The association was snapped in 2003, as he anchored his base in post-Soviet era Moscow.

Fortune favoured Zahoor, an inveterate risk-taker, as he betted big on steel. By the early 1990s, the MetalsRussia group was making an annual profit of $50 million (Dh183.65 million).

In 1996, Zahoor bought the dying Donetsk Metallurgical Steel Mill, which was founded by Welshman John Hughes in 1872 and where he had undergone practical training as an engineering student.

“We became cash-positive from the first day of our acquisition. Italy’s Danieli group was entrusted with the task of modernisation even though the plant was in debt to the tune of $150 million (Dh550.95 million),” he said.

Zahoor is a forerunner to steel barons such as Lakshmi Mittal because he enjoyed the first-mover advantage of tapping opportunities in the commodity sector in eastern Europe.

But steel brought pain and joy to Zahoor in equal measure.

“In 1996, Ukraine’s second president Leonid Kuchma was in power. Doing business in Russia and Ukraine was like the Wild West, where you had to constantly look behind your back to ensure oligarchs don’t snatch your business away,” he recalled.

He had a brush with oligarch Rinat Akhmetov but managed to stave off the latter’s advances by forging a pact with another oligarch Viktor Nusenkis.

However, his victory was momentary, as Nusenkis wrested 90 per cent control of the plant from Zahoor.

In 1998, he changed the company’s name from MetalsRussia to International Steel and Tube Industries Limited ahead of the listing on the London Stock Exchange.

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joydeep@khaleejtimes.com