Vladimir Smirnov (businessman)

Vladimir Alexeyevich Smirnov (in Russian: Владимир Алексеевич Смирнов, b. 1957 in Pskov) is a prominent Russian businessman, former Director General of the Petersburg Fuel Company (1997–1998), former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Petersburg Fuel Company (1999–2001). In 2002–2007 was the Director General of Tekhsnabexport (TENEX) which carries out export of goods and services, produced by Russian nuclear enterprises.

He graduated in 1980 from the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrument Production, where he majored in electromechanical engineering. Later he gained a PhD in Technical Sciences (1986) and in Economics (2000).

Smirnov is also the author of ten inventions and 45 scientific papers. In 1988, he became the youngest Senior Researcher at the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrument Production. In 1988 he was awarded the State Science and Technology Prize for Young Researchers. The prize was donated to the Peace Foundation.

In 1990 he established one of Saint Petersburg's first joint ventures (with German partners), the real estate development company Inform-Future, which built the city's first office centre for foreign companies.

Not long after Vladimir Putin returned from his KGB service in Dresden, East Germany he had built a dacha in Solovyovka, located on the eastern shore of Lake Komsomolskoye on the Karelian Isthmus in Priozersky District of Leningrad Oblast, near St. Petersburg. The dacha had burned down in 1996. Putin had a new one built identical to the original and was joined by a group of seven friends, who built dachas beside his. Vladimir Smirnov was one of the members of the group which in the fall of 1996 formally registered their fraternity as co-operative society, calling it Ozero (Lake) and turning it into a gated community.

...
Wikipedia