WHEN Roman Abramovich woke up yesterday morning he was already the richest man in Russia and Britain, the owner of Chelsea Football Club and of the world’s largest yacht.

By the time his team went out on to the pitch at Anfield last night, the 38-year-old oil tycoon had an extra $9 billion (£5.1 billion) to his name. He sealed the biggest business deal in Russian history yesterday when Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant, agreed to buy the bulk of Sibneft, his oil company.

Gazprom signed an agreement to pay $13 billion (£7.3 billion) for a 72.7 percent stake in Sibneft held by Millhouse Capital, the company through which Mr Abramovich controls his business empire.

The media-shy tycoon has not revealed precisely how much of Millhouse Capital he owns, but industry insiders estimate that he will end up with a cash payment of around $9 billion from the deal.

It was an extraordinary windfall for a man born into poverty and orphaned at the age of four, who dropped out of college and started his business career selling plastic ducks.

He had bought Sibneft for about £100 million in one of the many shady privatisations overseen by the former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Perhaps more important, yesterday’s deal signalled that the Chelsea owner would avoid the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the tycoon who had his oil company, Yukos, forcibly re-nationalised and was jailed for eight years in May.

“If you’re Abramovich, you are probably over the moon — it’s a good time to sell an oil company,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital in Moscow. “Plus, the alternative has been clearly illustrated by what happened to Mr Khodorkovsky.”

The legal assault on Mr Khodorkovsky was widely seen as a Kremlin-instigated campaign to punish him for funding opposition parties and to seize control of his oil assets, also bought on the cheap in the 1990s.

Ever since his arrest, rumours have swirled that Mr Abramovich might be next in line as the Kremlin re-asserted its authority over the “oligarchs” who effectively ran the country under Mr Yeltsin.

Senior officials criticised Mr Abramovich over his lavish lifestyle, especially his purchase of Chelsea for £140 million and of his Pelorus yacht, Le Grand Bleu, for $120 million (£68 million). The casually dressed, unshaven tycoon, whose fortune was put at $13.3 billion (£7.5 billion) by Forbes magazine before yesterday’s deal, also owns a house in London’s Belgravia and a 440-acre Sussex estate. Yet he still managed to stay on good terms with the President, Vladimir Putin, mainly, because he stuck by a pact with Mr Putin to stay out of politics, unlike his former business partner, Boris Berezovsky, who was hounded into exile in Britain in 2001.

Mr Abramovich also did not resist Mr Putin’s attempts to re-establish state control of the oil industry and to build a national energy giant along the lines of Saudi Arabia’s ARAMCO.

With its nuclear arsenal and conventional forces obsolete and under-funded, the Kremlin wants to use Russia’s reserves of gas — the world’s largest — and oil to regain its influence on the global stage. Gazprom now controls some 20 per cent of the world’s gas production, providing a quarter of Europe’s supplies, and is planning to build pipelines to China.

Dmitry Medvedev, Gazprom’s chairman and Mr Putin’s chief of staff, said: “The acquisition of Sibneft is aimed at achieving Gazprom’s strategic task to turn into a global energy company, one of the leaders on the world energy market.”

The timing of the deal reflected well on President Putin, who pledged, in a national telephone call-in on Tuesday, to break oil companies’ monopoly on fuel prices and share out some of the country’s oil wealth.

Mr Abramovich has also curried favour with Mr Putin by responding to his call for oligarchs to be more socially responsible and re-invest in Russia.

In 2000 he was elected governor of Chukotka, a remote and impoverished region in Russia’s frozen Far East.

Since then he has invested some $1.3 billion (£730 million) in schools, hospitals, apartment blocks and other infrastructure in the region. He has even paid for local schoolchildren to take holidays to the Black Sea.

The only catch is that the Kremlin now wants Mr Abramovich to stay on as governor after his first term runs out at the end of this year. Mr Abramovich had repeatedly said that he did not want to run again, but the Kremlin introduced legislation this year under which governors are no longer elected but appointed by the President.

Mr Abramovich’s name was top of the list of candidates submitted to the Kremlin this week.

Asked if Mr Abramovich had agreed, his spokesman, John Mann, told The Times: “Well, if he’s nominated, that means he’s not against it.

“He’s still committed to Russia. He’s still the governor, he has other businesses and he has charities. This deal does not signal an exit from the country. In fact, it’s just the opposite.”

• The Financial Services Authority, the chief city watchdog, has closed its investigation into shareholdings in Chelsea Village, after a two-year inquiry, it said yesterday.

  The inquiry sought to identify the controlling parties behind offshore companies that pledged their shares to Mr Abramovich when he bid for Chelsea Football Club in 2003. The pledges allowed Mr Abramovich to get the deal through, as Ken Bates, then Chelsea’s chairman, had also voted his 29 per cent stake in favour of the takeover.

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