Arkady and Natalia Rotenberg Divorce

Divorce to the death between the Russian oligarch and his ex-wife Natalia, now the partner of an Armenian politician: thirty armed men seized her villa in Cap-Ferrat

The aphorism from Anna Karenina on unhappy families who are “each in their own way”, is perhaps the most cited in the (thick) divorce law of Russian oligarchs: the London judge who separated the billionaires Akhmedov two weeks ago with a 450 million settlement opened the sentence with the quote from Tolstoy, defining it the most ferocious divorce ever. The record didn’t last long.

The seizure of the villa on the French Riviera

July 10 Natalia Sergeevna Rotenberg, former wife of the richest man in Russia and a close friend of Putin (the circumstances are connected), was unable to return to the family villa in Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera. The villa, he wrote on Instagram, attaching the surveillance videos, «had been kidnapped by a group of Chechen terrorists“. The thirty armed men – reconstruction later confirmed by French TV which broadcast images of the assault – “threw out the guards, occupied the house, broke in and replaced the padlocks.” The instigators of the intrusion would have been “high-level oligarchs who doesn’t like my active lifestyle. I know who I am ». The allusion is to the ex-husband.

The richest man in Russia

That is Arkady Romanovic Rotenberg: 69 years old, born in St. Petersburg, patriarch of the family who for Forbes it is today the richest in Russia. A heritage of $ 5.45 billion built over years of government concessions, from gas to Mostotrest highways, from earthmoving to publishing, from airports to vodka. Not irrelevant, in this ascent, friendship with President Putin, iron since 1963 when, twelve years old, they trained together in a famous club in partner, the Russian martial art. Now they compete in judo (Putin wins); and Rotenberg did not hesitate, for example, to declare himself “the real beneficiary” of the famous super villa on the Black Sea “discovered” by the opponent Alexei Navalny, who attributed it to the president. Jokes are wasted on his loyalty to his friend Vladimir: when Biden called him “a killer” a Rotenberg cartoon circulated that said “the killer is me!”. The Rotenbergs were among the hardest hit by US and EU sanctions: in 2014, Italy also froze their accounts and their hotels in Rome.

Two children, ten years of marriage

Arkady and Natalia Rotenberg married in 2005; the divorce was finalized in 2015, and of their marital decade there are two children, aged 9 and 11, and not a single photo together. The daughter owns 60% of the villa, of which Natalia owns the remaining 40%. In the divorce, the law would have awarded her half of the common property, but she would have been content with “some real estate.” After all, she quickly rebuilt her life: now she is the wife of the Armenian politician Tigran Arzakantsyan, she has opened two companies in Yerevan and is very active in his electoral campaign. With her ex-husband she has always said that she maintains «excellent relations. I don’t want him any harm and I always keep him on a pedestalHe said in an interview.

Castles, Works of Art and Panama Papers

They’ve actually been fighting, in and out of court, since 2013. For the manor in Surrey from 45 million euros; for the Magritte of him, which ended up in the Panama Papers because they were bought from Chinese boxes that “cleaned up” the money; even on the surname Rotenberg, which she tried to deposit in 2019 in order to launch lines of ultra-luxury cosmetics and spirits. And already in 2019 she had found the locks of the villa on the French Riviera changed, but an order from the judge had allowed her to return. Now at Forbes Russia a source close to the family calls her “shocked” by her ex-husband’s violence. “She was convinced they broke up well.”