Alfa Group
Alfa Group flourished considerably after Fridman recruited Petr Aven, the former Minister of Foreign Economic Relations for the Russian Federation; in 1994 Aven became President and Chairman of Alfa Bank. By late 1996, thanks to the success of Alfa Bank and Alfa Group, Boris Berezovsky, in an interview by the "Financial Times", named Fridman and Aven as among the seven businessman and bankers who controlled most of the economy and media in Russia, and who had helped bankroll Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign.