Yury Valentinovich Kovalchuk (; born 25 July 1951) is a Russian billionaire businessman and financier who is "reputed to be Vladimir Putin's personal banker". The Panama Papers leak revealed that Kovalchuk had transferred at least $1 billion to an offshore entity. Kovalchuk is a close friend of Putin: he hosted the wedding of Putin's daughter Katerina Tikhonova to Kirill Shamalov at his ski resort, Igora, in 2013. According to journalist Mikhail Zygar, Kovalchuk could probably be called Number 2 in today's Russia. While self-isolating from COVID-19 in 2020, Putin spent much time with Kovalchuk, and they share the view that the only important factor is to restore Russian greatness. Life From 1987 to 1991, he was the first deputy director of Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute. In 1992, Kovalchuk was a founder of the STREAM Corporation (). Kovalchuk is very closely associated with Vladimir Stolyarenko. Since the early 1990s, Kovalchuk has owned a dacha in Solovyovka in the Priozersky District of the Leningrad region, located on the eastern shore of the Komsomolskoye lake on the Karelian Isthmus near Saint Petersburg. His neighbours there are Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Yakunin, Andrei Fursenko, Sergey Fursenko, Viktor Myachin, Vladimir Smirnov and Nikolay Shamalov. Together they instituted the co-operative society Ozero (the Lake) which united their properties on 10 November 1996. In November 2000, he was a main shareholder of the Brewery "Baltika" (). Since 2004, he has been chair of Rossiya Bank and its largest shareholder. The May 2008 issue of Russian Forbes listed him for the first time in its Golden Hundred of Russia's richest, calling him and another new entrant to the List, Gennady Timchenko, "good acquaintances of Vladimir Putin." The magazine placed him at number 53 on the Russians-only list, with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion. After sanctions imposed on Kovalchuk in 2018, this dropped to $650 million. His elder brother Mikhail Kovalchuk is the scientific secretary of the Council for Science and High Technologies attached to the president of the Russian Federation. In 2015, Yury Kovalchuk's National Media Group (NMG) and US Discovery Channel joined forces to form Media Alliance of which NMG owns 80%. Later that year, Kovalchuk acquired the rights to Ted Turner's Russian assets including the Russian version of CNN, Cartoon Network and Boomerang. The reason for the sale was based on the Russian media ownership law that limits ownership of Russian media by foreigners. In 2017, Kovalchuk