Grigory Luchansky

Grigory Emmanuilovich Luchansky was born in Tashkent, in the Uzbek SSR, on 8 February 1945. His father, Emmanuil Luchansky, was a military doctor and Second World War veteran who died in 1949; his mother, Berta Vladimirskaya, was an economist who later worked in Riga and died there in 1975.

He studied metallurgical engineering at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys from 1963 to 1968 and was then assigned to work in the Latvian SSR. He went on to study construction economics at the Moscow Institute of Management named after Ordzhonikidze from 1968 to 1973, followed by postgraduate work there, and later held a doctorate in economics.

In Latvia he founded one of the first student construction brigades and in 1969 headed the republic's student construction headquarters under the Latvian Komsomol. In 1974 he was appointed pro rector for administration and economic affairs at the Latvian State University, the youngest pro rector in the republic.

In 1982 he was arrested and in 1983 sentenced to seven years for misappropriating state property worth 2,564 roubles. In a labour colony in Jekabpils he was made head of a factory construction project that had stood at foundation level for a decade, and it was finished in about a year. He was paroled in 1985, worked in construction in Solikamsk in the Urals, where he made contacts in the potash industry, and then became deputy to Albert Kauls at the Adazi agricultural collective near Riga.

After Mikhail Gorbachev visited Adazi in 1987, the collective set up a foreign trade company, Adazimpeks, which began exporting Soviet potash fertiliser. On 26 February 1990 Adazimpeks registered Nordex in Austria. Within about a year Luchansky had bought out his partners and become sole owner. Nordex traded fertilisers, metals and oil products and by 1993 was one of the five largest exporters of oil products from the Commonwealth of Independent States, with interests in Latvian transit through the port of Ventspils and projects in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and elsewhere.

In 1993 he met President Bill Clinton at a Democratic Party fundraising breakfast, and American and British press reports soon linked him to Russian organised crime. In 1996 Time magazine described him as the man many considered the world's most dangerous criminal who had never been charged. He was refused entry to Britain, Nordex contracts and accounts were frozen, and he wound down the company. He always denied wrongdoing, and in November 1997 FBI director Louis Freeh said in Moscow that Luchansky had never been prosecuted in the United States. From 1995 to 1997 he worked on investment projects with the Israeli businessman Shaul Eisenberg.

He sued The Times over articles about him, and the case, Loutchansky v Times Newspapers, produced important rulings in English defamation law, including on the liability of publishers for articles kept in online archives. In the late 1990s he founded the Centre for Investment Projects and Programmes in Moscow, which in 2003 became owner of the Moscow Automobile Company and took over management of the ZIL plant until the Moscow government bought it out in 2011. He was also a senior vice president of the International Congress of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and a member of the bureau of the Russian Jewish Congress.

Luchansky lived in Russia and Austria and kept close ties with Latvia. He was married and had three daughters and a son. With the singer Sergei Nikitin he supported a special school for blind and partially sighted children in Smolensk from 2002, and he took part in a Moscow project to build a blood plasma products plant.

Grigory Luchansky died in Vienna on 20 October 2026 at the age of 81. His death was confirmed by the Latvian businessman Yuli Krumins, who said his health had declined in recent years. No cause of death was made public. His funeral was arranged for Sunday 25 October 2026 at the Jewish cemetery in Riga, with a memorial gathering to follow.

Luchansky was one of the first private traders to build a fortune out of the Soviet collapse, and Nordex was for a time among the largest companies in Austria. The Israeli business paper Globes estimated his wealth at its peak at about 2 billion dollars. His reputation remained contested: he was the subject of years of allegations in the Western press but was never charged in the United States, and his libel litigation against The Times left a lasting mark on English media law.