Everyone's writing their best of 2013 columns and blogs, but some of the year's most interesting financial advice came from an exiled Russian billionaire. Yevgeny Chichvarkin is the owner of Hedonism Wine in Mayfair, London. His customers are in the money no object category and to him spending £120,000 (HK$1.53 million) on a bottle of wine is not an absurd extravagance. "Why?" He says, adding he knows several people who would happily spend this much on the Penfolds Ampoule of 2004 Australian cabernet sauvignon.
This kind of spending is not over the top. It could be a present for someone who's hard to impress, he tells Britain's Guardian newspaper. "For some people who have been rich for a long, long time, it is quite hard to make an impression." It's not decadent. "I know families who spend more than £100m for a yacht," he says. From their perspective, the price is not noteworthy; besides, thrown into the price of the bottle is a promise that the wine maker will fly from Australia to open it with a special knife.
Mobile phone entrepreneur
Hedonism opened last year and caters to the international super-rich. Chichvarkin is one too.
He made his fortune as co-founder of Evroset, a chain of 5,000 mobile phone stores, but lost much of it when he had to flee Moscow in 2008, blaming demands from corrupt officials to pay bribes. He sold up, and the Sunday Times rich list now puts his wealth at £150 million.
London seemingly now has more multimillionaire residents than any other city, according to WealthInsight, with more than 4,000 with more than £20m each.