THERE have been virtually no sightings of Roman Abramovich outside Russia until now, and his purchase of Chelsea for what is, to him, petty cash is another sign of the stirring of Russia’s mega-rich tycoons into the wider world.

Mr Abramovich, 36, is married with children. He dresses casually and wears a slight stubble. He is a keen football fan but no one is quite sure if he has an interest or not in a Russian club. The last person to enlighten us further is Mr Abramovich himself. He has said: “What’s the difference between a rat and a pet mouse? Public relations.”

He is so reclusive that not so long ago in Moscow there was a newspaper competition to try to find a photograph of him.

Carefully guarded from the world by a charming American “gatekeeper”, John Mann, and eating food cooked only by his Austrian chef, Mr Abramovich keeps the press at bay, either by polite refusal or by simply disappearing to Chukotka in Far Eastern Siberia, the Russian region which he governs and which, to Westerners, is one of the remotest and least hospitable places on Earth.

The region was the last outpost of Stalin’s horrific camps, a place where temperatures have been known to fall to -90F, where prisoners, camp guards and even their Alsatians, froze to death on the spot. Now, however, its 75,000 inhabitants, many of whom are former inmates or their descendants, have a champion in Mr Abramovich. He is immensely popular and some believe that his keen interest in the region is a dry run for the mayoralty of Moscow.

Behind his protective walls, Mr Abramovich is a quiet, softly spoken and reflective man. He was born in Ukraine in 1966. His mother’s family came from there, his father’s from the Baltic.

In 1940, when the Soviet Army entered the Baltic states, his parents lost everything and were deported to Krasnoyarsk, a deeply depressing industrial city in central Siberia that, 55 years later, would be the home of the world’s second biggest aluminium company, RusAl, co-owned by Roman Abramovich.

“When I was young,” he says, “I lost my parents but my upbringing was happy.” He was two when he was orphaned and was brought up by his grandfather in Komi, an Arctic region north of Moscow the subsoil of which would later yield the oil that made him a second fortune. “I spent my childhood with the son of an oil man,” he says.

When he left school he won a place at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas. In the Soviet Union, Jews were the object of legal discrimination, barred from certain universities and careers. Mr Abramovich quietly runs one of two Jewish charitable associations in Russia, organised with President Putin’s blessing. He does not, as do some oligarchs, use Soviet anti-Semitism as a raison d’être. He has no self-pity. But such personal discrimination must leave its mark.

Contacts were the coin of the realm in Mikhail Gorbachev’s, and later Boris Yeltsin’s, Russia, and Mr Abramovich made perhaps the most vital contact of his early career at the Moscow Institute: Eugene Shvidler. In May this year Mr Shvidler became chairman of Yukos-Sibneft, the fourth largest oil company in the world, formed from Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos and Mr Abramovich’s Sibneft. It was a long way from Mr Abramovich’s start in 1992 selling retread tyres.

His other crucial contact was Boris Berezovsky. In 1993-94 Mr Berezovsky was Russia’s chief oligarch, a king-maker who, with his own and other oligarchs’ money, would go on to make “Czar” Yeltsin the President in 1996. Mr Abramovich, then 26, was head of an oil trading firm in Omsk and was carefully cultivating local politicians who enabled his company to grow into the most powerful in the region. Mr Berezovksy spotted him and invited him to join the board of a new oil company that he was setting up called Sibneft, and later made him chairman.

“Yeltsin created Sibneft,” Mr Abramovich says, “at the stroke of his pen.”

Mr Berezovsky was forced to leave Russia in 2001 under the shadow of alleged fraud. He is now appealing against an extradition order, pursued by President Putin himself. Mr Abramovich, always the politician, made peace with Mr Putin and has assumed Mr Berezovsky’s former interests in Russia. The relationship between the two men now is clouded by the realpolitik of Mr Abramovich’s peace with the President.

Mr Abramovich diplomatically refers to Mr Berezovsky as “Comrade”, while at a recent party in London, Mr Berezovsky indicated how he felt betrayed by Mr Abramovich.

Mr Abramovich has made billions from the sale of a stake in Sibneft and will make even more from the rumoured sale of a car company in Russia co-owned with his partner and fellow oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. He has an asset management company in London, Millhouse: “I can’t run it at the moment, because I’m governor, but it belongs to me.” It is likely that his current cash-enrichment will lead to purchases that are more significant than that of Chelsea.

Some observers say that he has made a big mistake in attracting the British press into his private world. Others, more astutely perhaps, say that he is getting the uncomfortable attention out of the way while he’s simply buying a football club. When he decides to go for a serious British company, his story will be all played out.

As the sharp eyes of Mr Abramovich turn westwards, you can be sure he has bigger plans than acquiring Chelsea for a mere £140 million.

Simon Bell is writing a book about Russia’s oligarchs.

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