Temur Akhmedov wasn’t your typical college student.
The son of a Russian billionaire, Temur lived in a $39-million London flat that was given to him when he was just a teenager. During that time, he developed a taste for the stock market. A costly taste.
According to the eye-popping details of one of Europe’s biggest divorce trials, as covered by the Financial Times, Temur claimed that he lost some $50-million daytrading, while studying private banking at the prestigious London School of Economics.
“ ‘Some of the extremely rich lavish their children with unimaginable sums.’ ”
Temur’s mother, Tatiana, is fighting to get $606 million owed by her ex-husband, Farkhad Akhmedov, from a 2016 settlement. For his part, Farkhad, whose vast fortune includes a superyacht, a helicopter and a private art collection, has refused to pay because he said the settlement was superseded by their divorce in Moscow two decades prior.
Now she’s seeking $94 million from her son, who’s contesting the claim. Tatiana said Temur, her eldest, helped his dad hide assets from her. But he said he lost it all with some terrible trades.
Farkhad, a one-time fur trader who became one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs by cashing in on a gas producer in Siberia, wasn’t too pleased with his son’s market exploits.
“I suspected he was thinking that he would never have made the same mistakes that I had,” Temur said, in comments cited by Bloomberg. “To him, it was a shocking sum to have lost, especially so quickly.” He apparently didn’t start off so unlucky in the stock game. He said he had some wins initially but then hit a losing streak, ramped up risk to get it back and ultimately lost everything.
As for the court case, Temur’s lawyer, in opening written remarks, said that the money passed down by his father wasn’t part of some eleaborate scheme to shield assets.
“That the sums were astronomical is nothing to the point,” he said. “Some of the extremely rich lavish their children with unimaginable sums. That is what Farkhad and Tatiana did during their marriage; Farkhad continued it towards the end of the marriage and thereafter.”
Will she ever get paid? London, according to the FT, is known as the “divorce capital of the world” due to the how generous the judges tend to be toward financially weaker spouses.
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