Who Holds the Money in Cyprus? The Island's Wealthiest Men in 2026

Cyprus is a place people underestimate. It is an island you can drive across in a couple of hours, with a population smaller than many single cities, and yet an unusual amount of serious money passes through it or calls it home. Some of that comes down to geography, sitting between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. A lot of it comes down to policy: for years the island offered residency and, until the scheme was shut down, citizenship to people who invested enough, and its tax and company rules made Limassol and Nicosia a comfortable base for shipping firms, holding companies and family offices.

So when we set out to answer a simple question, who actually holds the money in Cyprus in 2026, the list that came back was not full of old Cypriot families. It was full of people who chose the island: a Norwegian tanker king who gave up his passport, an Indian banker with a famous younger brother, Russian industrialists who built empires in steel, gas and fertiliser, a Greek Cypriot who turned cheap flights into a household brand, and a software engineer whose tools half the world's programmers use every day.

A word on the numbers before we start. Personal fortunes move with share prices, commodity markets and exchange rates, and nobody outside a billionaire's own accountants knows the real figure. The values below are rounded estimates drawn from publicly reported holdings and wealth trackers, and they are there to give a sense of scale, not to settle arguments. What matters more, and what we have tried to explain for each person, is where the money came from and why Cyprus is part of the story.

The wealthiest men connected to Cyprus, from the top down

1. Vinod Adani

Most people know the Adani name because of Gautam Adani, the Indian tycoon whose ports, airports and power plants made him one of the richest men in Asia. Fewer know that his elder brother Vinod, now in his late seventies, is the one with a Cypriot passport. Vinod Adani spent decades abroad, first trading in Singapore and later running the family's overseas dealings from Dubai, and along the way he picked up Cypriot citizenship through the investment programme the island ran before it was abolished.

His fortune, estimated at somewhere above twenty billion dollars, is really a slice of the wider Adani business: infrastructure, energy, green power and the trading operations that feed them. He does not run the group day to day and keeps a far lower profile than his brother, but on paper he is the wealthiest person with a Cypriot passport, and by a comfortable margin.

2. John Fredriksen

If there is one name on this list that Cypriots themselves would recognise, it is John Fredriksen. The Norwegian-born shipowner, now in his eighties, famously handed back his Norwegian citizenship in 2006 after a long argument with the Norwegian tax authorities and became Cypriot instead. He has been the island's most talked-about resident billionaire ever since.

Fredriksen made his money the old-fashioned way, buying oil tankers when nobody else wanted them and running one of the largest tanker fleets on the planet. Plenty of those ships sail under the Cyprus flag, and his group companies, including Frontline and Golar LNG, have long had their headquarters in Limassol. He has since spread into fish farming, drilling rigs and dry bulk shipping, and his combined holdings are worth in the region of twenty billion dollars. He remains the clearest example of why Cyprus courted shipping money in the first place.

3. Viktor Vekselberg

Viktor Vekselberg built his wealth in the years after the Soviet Union collapsed, first in aluminium and later in oil through the TNK-BP venture, before folding everything into his Renova group. He took Cypriot citizenship well over a decade ago, back when the island was the favourite European base for Russian capital.

His public image is oddly gentle for a metals and energy magnate: he is best known outside business circles for buying a collection of Fabergé eggs and bringing them back to Russia. Sanctions since 2018 have complicated his affairs and made a precise valuation harder than it used to be, but even conservative estimates leave him with several billion dollars and a firm place near the top of this list.

4. Dmitry Rybolovlev

Dmitry Rybolovlev is the potash man. He turned Uralkali, a fertiliser producer in the Urals, into one of the world's biggest suppliers of the stuff farmers cannot do without, then sold his stake in 2010 for a sum that set him up for life several times over. He has held Cypriot citizenship for years and has used the island as one of several bases alongside Monaco.

Football fans know him for a different reason. Rybolovlev bought AS Monaco in 2011 and bankrolled the club's rise from the French second division to a title in 2017 and a Champions League semi-final. He has also made headlines in the art world, including a very public dispute over paintings he bought through a dealer. His fortune is generally put in the low-to-mid billions.

5. Alexander Abramov

Alexander Abramov trained as a physicist and ended up running one of the largest steel companies in the world. He co-founded Evraz in the 1990s, gathering up steel mills and coal mines that were struggling after privatisation and turning them into a group that once supplied rails and construction steel across Russia, Europe and North America.

Abramov later stepped back from the chairman's seat and now spends much of his time on investments and, by his own account, on fishing. Cypriot citizenship came with the era when many Russian industrialists structured their holdings through the island. His net worth is estimated at a few billion dollars, most of it still linked to the steel business he built.

6. Yakir Gabay

Yakir Gabay is the quiet property investor on this list. Israeli-born and Cypriot by citizenship, he spent the early part of his career in banking, including a spell running Bank Leumi's investment banking arm, and then did something few bankers manage: he built a real estate empire of his own.

The centrepiece is Aroundtown, one of the largest listed commercial property companies in Europe, where he is the largest shareholder and long served as vice chairman. He also holds a big stake in Grand City Properties, which owns tens of thousands of apartments across Germany and in London. Neither company is glamorous, but office blocks, hotels and rental flats have made him one of the wealthiest people connected to Cyprus, with a fortune in the low billions.

7. Igor Makarov

Before he was a businessman, Igor Makarov was a professional cyclist who rode for the Soviet national team. After his racing days he founded Itera, which grew into the biggest independent natural gas company in Russia during the 1990s, supplying former Soviet republics and eventually selling its core assets to Rosneft.

Makarov has kept his sporting ties, backing cycling teams and serving on the board of the sport's world governing body, and he has lived and invested in Cyprus for years, with interests that include property and energy projects. His wealth is estimated at a little over two billion dollars.

8. Vladimir Krupchak

Vladimir Krupchak made his money in something most people never think about: pulp and paper. He built up the Arkhangelsk Pulp and Paper Mill, one of the largest producers of cardboard and packaging material in Russia, and later expanded into forestry and timber processing under the Pulp Mill Holding umbrella, which is registered in Austria.

In 2023 Krupchak went further than most on this list and gave up his Russian citizenship altogether in favour of his Cypriot one. Now in his late sixties, he is worth an estimated one and a half billion dollars or so, and his story is a reminder that not every fortune here comes from oil, gas or metals.

9. Stelios Haji-Ioannou

Sir Stelios is the one entry here who is Cypriot by birth rather than by paperwork. The son of a Greek Cypriot shipowner, he was born in Athens, educated in London and, at the age of 28, started an airline with two leased planes and a loan from his father. That airline was easyJet, and it changed the way Europeans fly.

He no longer runs easyJet, and he has had famous public rows with its board over the years, but his family remains the biggest shareholder, and his private company easyGroup owns the "easy" brand itself, licensing it to everything from hotels and car hire to coffee and gyms. He splits his time between Monaco, London and Cyprus, gives away a good deal of money through his foundation, and is worth an estimated one and a half billion dollars, give or take the airline's share price on any given week.

10. Sergey Dmitriev

Sergey Dmitriev rounds out the list, and he is the most modern fortune on it. In 2000 he and two colleagues founded JetBrains in Prague, a company that makes the tools programmers use to write code. If you have ever heard a developer mention IntelliJ or Kotlin, that is his company. JetBrains has never taken outside investment and never listed on a stock exchange, which is rare for a technology business of its size.

The company moved its headquarters to Cyprus in recent years, and Dmitriev holds Cypriot citizenship. Because JetBrains is private, his wealth can only be estimated, but with the firm valued in the billions his personal share is generally put at well over a billion dollars. He is proof that Cyprus is no longer only a home for shipping and commodity money.

What the list says about Cyprus

Read the ten names together and a pattern jumps out. Only one was born into a Cypriot family. The rest arrived through the door the island opened deliberately: a friendly tax regime, a strong shipping registry, a legal system based on English law and, for a decade, a passport in exchange for investment. That programme is gone now, closed after a scandal, and Cyprus has tightened its rules in step with the rest of Europe. The fortunes it attracted, though, are still here, and the newer arrivals, particularly in technology, suggest the island's pull has not faded. The names on this list will shuffle as markets move, but the story behind them is likely to hold for a while yet.