Alexander Mashkevitch

Mashkevich was born in Frunze, Kyrgyz SSR, Soviet Union, on 23 February 1954. His father, Anton, a doctor born in Lithuania, and his mother, Rakhel Yoffe, a lawyer born in Vitebsk, in northern Belarus, were evacuated to Kyrgyzstan in 1941. He was also a major donor to the Israel lobby group European Friends of Israel. In 2002, in apparent consultation with Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Mashkevich asked Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev — a personal friend — to intervene with Iranian authorities to release Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah. ==Career==

Mashkevich, Patokh Chodiev, and Alijan Ibragimov formed "the Trio", a group of Kazakh businessmen who became billionaires. Mashkevich was a major shareholder in the Eurasian National Resources Corporation (ENRC), now one of the world's leading natural resources groups. ENRC, based in London, operates a number of metals assets in Kazakhstan and Africa, having acquired numerous mining operations in Eastern Europe and Africa. In 2009, ENRC generated a $1.464 billion profit on sales of $3.8 billion. ENRC was floated on the London Stock Exchange in December 2007, with a market capitalisation on admission of approximately £6.8 billion. In 2013, ENRC was privatized to form the Eurasian Resources Group. Mashkevich was one of the owners of London-based Alferon Management, which acquired mining operations in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Kosovo, Russia, and other countries. In 2019, he was on the Forbes list of billionaires, with a worth of $2.4 billion. On 6 April 2011, Mashkevitch announced his intention to found a Jewish version of Al-Jazeera. == Personal life and death ==

Alexander Mashkevich was married and had two children. He was the owner of the luxury yacht Lady Lara. Mashkevitch died on 22 March 2025, at the age of 71. == References ==