Inkombank's Vinogradov Dead at 52.

(From The Moscow Times)

Vladimir Vinogradov, founder of Inkombank and one of seven influential bankers who enjoyed direct access to then-President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, died of a stroke in a Moscow hospital Sunday at the age of 52.

For many who lived through the 1998 financial crisis, Inkombank, one of Russia's largest private lenders, became synonymous with deception. The company, which had the second-most clients in Russia after state-owned Sberbank, left thousands of individuals out in the cold, paying meager compensation for deposits lost in the crash.

But before the bank's collapse, Vinogradov, a native of Ufa and a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute, created a financial empire using Western blueprints for classical banking, in which the bank focused on expanding the number of small clients instead of getting cheap money from the government, as most other big banks did.

"This, by the way, showed during the 1998 default because regular people are the most fluid and nervous group of clients," Vinogradov said in his last interview, in 2005, to banking magazine Natsionalny Bankovsky Zhurnal. "We tried not to pay attention to the Russian realities in the hope that eventually our position would be understood and adopted by other banks."

Created in 1990, Inkombank had 140 branches across Russia by 1998 and had accumulated the third-biggest total assets after Sberbank and SBS-Agro, which also crashed in 1998. Some 350,000 individuals and 10,000 companies had accounts at Inkombank at the time. The bank also amassed one of the finest collections of Russian art, including Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square," all of which was eventually sold off to cover debts.

But before becoming one of ...