Oleg Deripaska says little and avoids the limelight in which other Russian oligarchs often wallow. Some attribute this quiet demeanour to shyness, though it also serves to throw a cloak around the business and political dealings of Russia's wealthiest man.

He will hardly enjoy being at the centre of the controversy now swirling in Britain around meetings on board his yacht, the Queen K. But with his business empire struggling under the impact of the global financial meltdown, he might not be giving it too much thought either.

Mr Deripaska, 40, is used to operating in far more dangerous waters. As a young man fresh out of university, he grew rich by building a career in metals and surviving the brutal "aluminium wars" that erupted after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The lucrative industry became a target for mafia gangs, corrupt state officials and former KGB officers. Contract killings were a common way to settle business disputes.

By 25, Mr Deripaska was director-general of the Siberian Sayansk aluminium plant and recalls sleeping in the factory to protect it against hostile takeovers by its former owner. He once narrowly avoided a reception committee waiting to blow him up with a grenade launcher.

Mr Deripaska eventually consolidated his grip on the industry with the help of Roman Abramovich. The Chelsea owner bought most of the holdings in Russia's aluminium industry in 2000 and merged them with Mr Deripaska's company to create RusAl.

Mr Deripaska later bought out Mr Abramovich for an estimated $2 billion and RusAl now accounts for 75 per cent of aluminium production in Russia. He merged the company with SUAL and the Swiss company Glencore last year to form the world's largest aluminium producer.

His Basic Element holding now embraces more than 100 companies in areas as varied as airports, car manufacturing, construction, oil and minerals, and financial services, employing more than 300,000 people worldwide.

Like many rich Russians, Mr Deripaska admires Britain and has a £25 million mansion in London's Belgravia. He studied at the London School of Economics to improve his English, flying in for classes every week for a year on his private jet.

His upbringing could not have been further from George Osborne's gilded existence as the son of a baronet. He was raised by his grandparents in a Cossack village near Krasnodar, southern Russia, while his widowed mother moved to another city to find work.

He was just seven when his grandparents died and the state seized their property as part of a policy of breaking up Cossack settlements. Mr Deripaska was shunted from one relative to another for years until he was reunited with his mother as a teenager.

While Mr Osbourne was living it up as a member of Oxford University's notorious Bullingdon Club, Mr Deripaska was an impoverished physics student at Moscow State University.

“We had no money,” he told one interviewer. “It was a very practical question every day. How do I get to buy food and keep from starving?”

Unlike many wealthy Russians, Mr Deripaska lives in Russia and insists that he has no plans to leave, arguing that it is the best country in which to do business. He enjoys Vladimir Putin's blessing and is heavily involved in helping to finance the Prime Minister's pet project, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Mr Deripaska also has ties to the family of the late president Boris Yeltsin. He married Polina Yumashev in 2001, the daughter of Mr Yeltsin's former chief of staff. Mr Yumashev is married Mr Yeltsin's younger daughter Tatyana.

The US State Department revoked a multi-entry visa for Mr Deripaska in 2006, declining to explain its reasons. That decision has not been reversed. The Wall Street Journal also reported this month that Mr Deripaska was under investigation by US and British authorities over a $57.5 million wire transfer routed through Barclays Bank in New York and London.

Times Recommends

• Ashes bid in chaos as big gamble fails
• Private schools secretly put up for sale
• Council tax debt-chasers on £600 an hour