After leaving university he worked for a wholesale company that sold consumer goods. Mikhail Fridman, one of the original oligarchs, was a friend from college and appointed him to lead Alfa Eco, a wholesale trading company that is a member of the Alfa Group Consortium. Alfa Group, which he also shares with another fellow billionaire and college peer, Alexei Kuzmichev, is the biggest financial and industrial investment group in Russia. He became president of Alfa Eco in 1996 and was instrumental in directing the company to focus on export and the oil trade. When Alfa bought Tyumen Oil (TNK) in 1997, he joined the board of directors.
He was deputy chairman of TNK Oil Company from 1997 until 2003. In 2003, Khan worked with the other TNK owners to form a 50–50 joint venture with British Petroleum (BP), in what was the largest foreign investment in Russia to date, at US$8 billion.
TNK-BP became Russia’s third-largest oil company. In 2013, TNK-BP was sold to Rosneft for US$56 billion, a sale described by Reuters as “one of the biggest energy takeovers in history”. Having personally trousered around $3 billion from the deal, Khan then joined Mikhail Fridman in establishing LetterOne, based in Luxembourg, for the purpose of investing some of the proceeds in international projects. LetterOne’s L1 Energy fund was founded in 2013. Khan has donated funds to non-profits such as the European Jewish Fund, and co-founded and supports the Genesis Philanthropy Group.
