Konstantin Nikolaev

Konstantin Yuryevich Nikolaev (also transliterated as Nikolayev) is an international businessman and Global Ports. He is under sanctions by Ukraine. He began exiting his Russian business interests in 2014 and completed this process in early 2024.

Biography Konstantin Nikolaev was born in Dnipropetrovsk on 5 March 1971.

In 1993, Nikolaev graduated from Moscow State University, which he entered in 1988. He initially studied in the Department of the History of Foreign Philosophy, but later transferred to the Department of Ethics, both within the Faculty of Philosophy. His thesis focused on Plato's The Republic.

Nikolaev began his career in transportation and logistics in the early 1990s as a forwarding agent at Murmansk port, where he coordinated the loading and unloading of ships.

In 1994, Nikolaev co-founded Aniko Marine, a transportation and forwarding company that serviced major steel companies including Novolipetsk Steel (NLMK) and Cherepovets Steel Mill. As General Director and one-third shareholder, he managed client relationships and negotiated with ports, shippers, and competitors. In early 2008, Mordashov sold his 50% stake in Severstaltrans to Nikolaev and his partners then Severstaltrans changed its name to N-Trans . In 2008, 70% of Globaltrans shares were held by N-Trans.

He served as CEO from 1997 until 2008 (when Severstaltrans was restructured and rebranded as N-Trans), overseeing the company's growth into a leading provider of transportation and logistics services in Russia. During this period, the company began accumulating railway and port assets.

Late in 2011, Nikolaev and Mishin sold to Gennady Timchenko their 13% stake for $150–200 million in Transoil, which is one of the largest railway transporters of oil and oil products in Russia.

In 2014, Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, Andrey Kunatbaev, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Abramov, and Alexander Voloshin became the majority investors in John Houghtaling II's American Ethane. After Roman Abramov divested his investment in American Ethane in April 2017, Nikolaev, Yuriev, and Kunatbaev became co-owners of American Ethane with a combined stake of 88%. (Alexander Voloshin is a secret investor in the remaining 12% stake.)

Before October 2014, Nikolaev and his investment partners owned a combined 31.55% stake and Arkady Rotenberg held the other 68.45% stake in Marc O'Polo Investments which held a 38.63% stake in the major road construction firm Mostotrest .

In April 2012, the partners sold a further 37.5% stake in Global Ports. At that time, Global Ports included the management of the ports at the First Container Terminal, Petrolesport, Ust-Luga Container Terminal, and the Moby Dick in northwestern Russia; Eastern Stevedoring Company in the Far East; and two in Finland: the Multi-Link Helsinki and the Multi-Link Kotka.

In January 2024, he finalized his exit from Globaltrans, which also marked his final exit from all Russian business interests—a process he had begun a decade prior.

ScanEx is closely associated with Arkady Rotenberg and Igor Rotenberg and his Mostotrest. (ScanEx acts as a system integrator, creating and implementing new technical and information technology solutions in various sectors of the country's economy, implements projects based on remote sensing data in the field of ecology, science and education.) Its subsidiaries are KOSMOSNIMKI.RU LLC , JSC "CRIT" (CENTER FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES) , and MULTISCAN LLC . ScanEx supports government and business structures, environmental organizations, research and educational institutions, including Roslesinforg, Rosreestr, Rosselkhoznadzor, Roshydromet, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia, the Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia, Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, Atomflot, Yandex, leading universities in Russia and many others. SCANEX products are remote sensing, GIS and web technologies in the countries of Russia, Vietnam, India, Iran, Spain, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, UAE, USA, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus. ScanEx Group is the only company in Russia and the CIS that directly receives data from remote sensing satellites to its own network of stations, processes satellite information using its own technologies and provides access to satellite images and products based on them through its own geoportal services developed by ScanEx, which guarantees the consumer a low cost for data and prompt deliveries. ScanEx is the official distributor of the world's leading remote sensing satellite operators including DigitalGlobe (USA), Airbus Defence and Space (France), ImageSat International (Israel), MDA (Canada), SatrecInitiative (Korea), e-GEOS (Italy), RESTEC (Japan), Deimos (Spain), etc., by offering satellite images of various spatial resolutions. ScanEx is the only domestic company in Russia that has signed license agreements for direct reception of data from spacecraft of the SPOT, EROS, RADARSAT series, which makes it possible to survey the territory of Russia 24/7. Its flagship projects are the Scanex Maritime portal, the development of geoinformation services for the forest industry, the modernization of the Scanex Catalog service for ordering and working with satellite images, the development of geoinformation products and solutions for the education sector, etc. and supported liberalization of arms ownership in Russia.

Nikolayev was one of the first investors in LLC "Photoelectronic Devices" (FP), established in 2013 to produce microbolometer arrays for night vision technologies, which Russia had previously been forced to import. FP was founded in September 2013 by a Cyprus-registered company, Rayfast Investments, and the company "Cyclone," a state research institution and one of the few Russian manufacturers of thermal imaging equipment.

Since 2013, Nikolaev has owned and operated the La Madonnina winery in Bolgheri, Tuscany, which he purchased for 4 million euros. Riccardo Cotarella, who is a consultant for Nikolaev's winery is also a consultant since spring 2017 to the 2009 established Divnomorsky Estate winery , which is also called Usadba Divnomorskoe, is very near Putin's palace which is located on the Black Sea coast near Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai, Russia, and, according to Alexei Navalny's Putin's Palace, Divnomorsky estate is the wine of Putin's palace, which is an official presidential house for the president of Russia, and the wine of Divnomorsky Estate, which began selling its wine to the public in October 2013, is often consumed at official Russian government state dinners, events, and functions. Wine from Divnomorsky Estate or Usadba Divnomorskoe, which is also transliterated as Usadba Divnomorskoye, is known as "Putin's wine". In 2010, Alexander Ponomarenko, who is the former co-owner of the Novorossiysk commercial sea port, became chairman of the board of directors of Sheremetyevo airport and gained ownership of Putin's Palace in 2011 from the co-owners of Rosinvest, which were Nikolai Shamalov and his two partners Dmitry Gorelov and Sergei Kolesnikov, owned Usadba Divnomorskoye and sold the winery in 2012 to Pavel Titov, who is the president of the Abrau-Durso winery and son of businessman Boris Titov. In January 2019, Gennady Timchenko and Vladimir Kolbin, who is the son of Pyotr, Petr or Peter Kolbin who is a close childhood friend of Vladimir Putin, became beneficial owners of Divnomorskoye Estate through gaining ownership of the firm Lazurnaya Yagoda, which controls Usadba Divnomorskoye, by their firm Development of Agrarian Initiatives (RAI) .

Konstanin Nikolaev and his whole family are citizens of Malta and his children are residents of Switzerland.

His wife Svetlana Ivanovna Nikolaeva , who enjoys shooting sports, till August 2020 owned ORSIS, a Russian sporting rifles firearms company. Nikolaev exited the business in 2014.

Honorary Citizen of Zavolzhye, Gorodets District, Nizhny Novgorod Region for his donation towards the construction and beautification of the Orthodox Church of the Life-Giving Trinity (2007).