A Day in the Life: Roustam Tariko visited London to launch his premium vodka brand, while overseeing his other ‘babies’
By James Moore
Published: 13 October 2007
8am
For a businessman, the banks-to-vodka billionaire Roustam Tariko is a late starter. “Wherever I am I start my day it’s the same. I’m not an early bird,” he says. “I’m not waking up at five o’clock, six o’clock; it’s usually seven-thirty, eight o’clock, and I will then read the newspapers, emails from around the world and make phone calls.”
During these calls, Mr Tariko says he will oversee his companies’ products – “my babies” – which include credit cards, loans, insurance policies and, of course, the all-important vodka. He will make strategic decisions and oversee the performance of his diverse investments around the world.
Right from the first introduction, it is clear that Roustam Tariko is very different from the identikit Western businessman. It starts from his appearance; he eschews a tie, favouring a dark suit and white shirt and wearing his dark hair long, with a wave. There is a thick wad of cash on the coffee table at his suite at the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane. Dotted around are ice buckets full of champagne and his Russian Standard vodka, while various flunkies fuss around him.
Russian Standard is the premium brand whose ads are beginning to saturate commercial television and which he has brought to Britain with the aim of taking on the big guns of Diageo, the owner of Smirnoff, and Pernod-Ricard, which owns Stolichnaya, outside Russia. Worldwide, he sold 1.4 million cases in 2006, compared to 1 million in 2005, and hopes to push that to 2 million this year.
He also, despite looks of horror from the management consultancy McKinsey when he did it, used the same brand for his bank (Russian Standard Bank). But his notion that Russians trusted the brand enough to borrow from it appears to have worked. While buffeted by the credit squeeze like virtually all banks, it is among the three most profitable in Russia, enjoying the status of (according to the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, no less), the largest specialised consumer finance bank.
11am
After spending the early part of the day with the papers and emails, Mr Tariko likes to run. Here in London, his exercise will be taken in one of the nearby parks; back in Russia, it will be in the forest outside Rublyovka, the exclusive suburb on the outskirts of Moscow that is favoured by the rich and powerful of Russia’s elite.
He then commences a whirlwind of media interviews connected with the launch of Russian Standard in the UK.
It is an unusual day. Typically, Mr Tariko says, after his exertions he will take a salad for lunch, where he will be joined by executives or assistants to talk business. He will follow this with several business meetings between 3pm until around 8pm – what he calls “the public part of my day”. Most of his days in London, however, are public because the tycoon is being followed by a French television crew, who plan to run a documentary about him.
5.30pm
The media swarm dealt with, Mr Tariko heads for the City to meet bankers at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank with which he says he has a long association. “They do a lot of work for me, mostly in the investment banking area. They help me to place my bonds and they buy themselves some products from me and they structure some financial deals for myself with other banks,” he says.
“We also exchange our points of view on financial markets, where they are going and what particular opportunities are created. Obviously, things have changed and we agree that the costs of borrowing will be higher from now on. We decide this creates opportunities for smart people like ourselves. I very much like and respect this institution,” he says.
