System Capital Management (SCM), founded by Rinat Akhmetov in 2000, is Ukraine’s largest private investment company. Akhmetov is its sole shareholder. The holding grew out of coke and coal trading operations in the early 1990s, when the post-Soviet economy was going through hyperinflation, unemployment and industrial shutdowns.
The development logic was sequential: first commodity trading, then acquiring minority stakes in coke and steel plants, and from 1998-99 onward – purchasing major enterprises with debt obligations, including Azovstal and mining and processing plants in Kryvyi Rih. An international trading arm emerged in parallel – today it is Metinvest International S.A., headquartered in Geneva. By 2000, the scale of assets required a unified management holding.
Group Structure
Today SCM brings together enterprises across several sectors. Metinvest Group handles mining and steelmaking as Ukraine’s largest producer. DTEK covers the full energy cycle, from coal mining and conventional generation to renewables and distribution. FUIB operates in banking; Ukrtelecom is the country’s largest fixed-line telecommunications operator. Corum Group manufactures mining equipment; HarvEast works in agriculture. The UMGI private equity firm functions as a private equity fund with a portfolio of eight companies across eight countries.
A separate track is FC Shakhtar Donetsk, which Akhmetov has led since 1996. The club won the UEFA Cup in 2009, played regularly in the Champions League, and reached the Conference League semifinals in the 2025/26 season. In 2021, UEFA President Čeferin presented Rinat Akhmetov with the UEFA Football Leadership Award. He was honored by Čeferin again in September 2026, in recognition of 30 years at the helm of FC Shakhtar Donetsk and the club’s 90th anniversary.
DTEK Energy Strategy
The energy arm of Rinat Akhmetov business operates through DTEK – Ukraine’s largest private investor according to the Forbes Ukraine 2024-2025 ranking. Total investment in Ukrainian energy since 2005 has exceeded €12 billion. While the company previously grew largely on its own resources, its strategy over the past two years has shifted toward international partnerships.
In June 2026, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk, DTEK signed a memorandum with American company GE Vernova to build a 650 MW combined-cycle gas turbine plant at the Burshtyn thermal power station site in western Ukraine. A joint distributed solar generation and storage project has been launched with British firm Octopus Energy. DTEK Oil&Gas signed an agreement with Halliburton on drilling technologies – targeting Ukraine’s natural gas reserves, the second largest in Europe. A standalone flagship is the 650 MW wind farm in the Poltava region, set to become the largest onshore wind installation in Eastern Europe by 2029.
During the war, DTEK has restored power supply to more than 26 million homes in regions affected by the war.
UMGI and Niche Markets
The UMGI investment division, established by SCM in 2006, operates as a PE fund: it identifies high-potential companies, develops them and brings them to market. Cumulative revenue across portfolio companies grew 50% in the most recent reporting period (as of 2024). The most notable direction is the systematic acquisition of clay deposit licenses in Transcarpathia – logistically closer to the EU border than frontline eastern sites – alongside kaolin deposits in the Zhytomyr region.
War, Losses and Arbitration
The full-scale invasion radically changed the asset structure of Rinat Akhmetov company. Plants in Donbas and Mariupol have been destroyed or remain under occupation. According to Forbes, Rinat Akhmetov net worth is estimated at $7.8 billion (2026). Since February 2022, the companies have invested approximately $4.3 billion, with more than $392 million directed toward defense and humanitarian programs. SCM Group’s tax payments for 2025 totaled $2.2 billion, and approximately $8 billion since the start of the invasion.
Akhmetov Rinat is simultaneously pursuing legal proceedings: a claim at the European Court of Human Rights covering more than 70 damaged assets and international commercial arbitrations over enterprises expropriated by Russia since 2014. Among them is Donbas Arena, into which over $400 million was invested. Recovered funds are planned to be directed toward Ukraine’s reconstruction and its integration into the EU economy.
Rinat Akhmetov defines his role in postwar recovery through continued investment – metallurgy, energy, the financial sector and football – while the Steel Front initiative coordinates all military assistance from his businesses to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and civilian aid flows through the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation and the Heart of Azovstal project.
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