The clock is ticking for Oleg Deripaska. The Russian oligarch at the centre of the political funding scandal needs $2 billion (£1.23 billion) by the end of next week.

A £50,000 donation to the Conservative Party is small change by comparison, but the controversy over whether George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, solicited money on board Mr Deripaska’s yacht casts an unwelcome spotlight on Russia’s richest man as he fights to preserve his business empire in the global market meltdown.

Mr Deripaska needs the money to keep hold of his 25 per cent stake in Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel producer, and the Siberian town where one of Stalin’s most notorious slave labour camps was located.

He must repay part of a $4.5 billion loan borrowed from a group of Western banks that financed his purchase. The loan was secured against Norilsk Nickel’s share price, which has plunged 75 per cent since May, putting his UC Rusal company in breach of a collateral agreement with the banks.

Mr Deripaska’s best hope of speedy refinancing rests with Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, who has pumped $50 billion into VEB, a state-owned bank, to lend money to Russian companies struggling under foreign debts. The two men have always been close and Mr Deripaska is a key investor in Mr Putin’s pet project, the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

He faces competition for the loan from other cash-strapped companies because VEB has received bids for aid totalling almost $100 billion. But the oligarch knows how to pull the levers of power in Mr Putin’s Russia, where politics and business are intertwined.

Mr Deripaska, 40, is very well connected. He was married in 2001 to Polina Yumashev, whose father Valentin was chief of staff to President Yeltsin. Valentin Yumashev later married Mr Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana, who had been instrumental in raising Mr Putin from obscurity and into the Kremlin.

Mr Deripaska was worth an estimated £16.2 billion before the financial crash. Unlike more ostentatious oligarchs, however, he has never been keen to flaunt his wealth, denying even that he is Russia’s richest man. He is reluctant to give interviews and friends describe him as modest, even shy. But the exterior masks an extremely agile mind, a steely character and a relentless will to win.

Mr Deripaska was raised by his grandparents in a Cossack village in southern Russia, while his widowed mother worked in another city. He was aged 7 when his grandparents died and the State seized their property as part of a policy of breaking up Cossack settlements. Mr Deripaska was shunted from one relative to another for years until, as a teenager, he was reunited with his mother.

As Mr Osborne was dining out with the Bullingdon Club at the University of Oxford, Mr Deripaska was searching for a square meal as an impoverished physics student at Moscow State University. He once remarked: “We had no money. It was a very practical question every day. How do I get to buy food and keep from starving?”

He made his fortune by surviving the “aluminium wars” that erupted in the early 1990s, when mafia gangs, corrupt officials and former KGB enforcers fought for control of the lucrative metals industry. At 25, Mr Deripaska was director-general of the Siberian Sayansk aluminium plant and recalls sleeping in the factory to protect it against a hostile takeover by its former owner. He once narrowly avoided a reception committee waiting for him with a grenade launcher.

He consolidated his grip on the industry with the help of Roman Abramovich. The man who became the Chelsea Football Club owner bought most of the holdings in Russia’s aluminium industry in 2000 and merged them with Mr Deripaska’s company to create Rusal. Mr Deripaska later bought out Mr Abramovich for an estimated $2 billion. He merged Rusal with Sual and the Swiss company Glencore last year to form the world’s largest aluminium producer.

Like Mr Abramovich, Mr Deripaska owns a house in Central London. He has been a frequent visitor to Britain since the early 1990s, has extensive business interests here and is no stranger to the High Court where he has fought a number of commercial battles. He studied at the London School of Economics, flying in every week for a year in his private jet to improve his English. Mrs Deripaska, 28, is close to Mr Abramovich’s girlfriend, Daria Zhukova. She now heads the publishing company that produces the Russian Hello! magazine.

Mr Deripaska expresses no desire to live outside Russia, however, describing it as the best place to do business. A strong patriotic streak emerges when he talks of turning Russian companies into worldbeaters, a characteristic that keeps him in Mr Putin’s good books. He is vice-president of the “oligarchs’ union”, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which is summoned for regular talks with Mr Putin and President Medvedev. He also sits on the board of trustees of the Bolshoi Ballet.

His investment company, Basic Element, encompasses more than 100 businesses in areas as varied as air-ports, construction, oil and financial services. They include LDV Holdings, the light van manufacturer in Birmingham that was the focus of alleged discussions about channelling an illegal donation to the Tories from Mr Deripaska.

Before the financial crisis, Basic Element was talking about preparing many of its businesses for flotations in 2010. Now Mr Deripaska is fighting to keep his Russian empire intact while unwillingly becoming a household name in Britain. “There is a Russian saying that money does not like attention,” he told an interviewer recently.

Security sources said last night that, despite reports that Mr Deripaska’s name was on an Interpol watchlist, he was not the subject of any continuing investigation.

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