Viktor Bout Net Worth

Net Worth:	$50 Million
Date of Birth:	January 13, 1967 (57 years old)
Gender:	Male
Profession:	Entrepreneur, Businessperson
Nationality:	Russia

What is Viktor Bout’s net worth? How does Viktor Bout make his money? Below is the current net worth of Viktor Bout and how Viktor Bout makes his money.

What is Viktor Bout’s Net Worth?

Viktor Bout is a Portuguese professional footballer who has a net worth of £27 million. Viktor Bout is a Russian arms dealer who has a net worth of $50 million. He is an entrepreneur and former Soviet military translator.

During the 1990s and 2000s, he reportedly used his several air transport companies to smuggle weapons since the collapse of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe to Africa and the Middle East.

Early Life

Viktor Bout was born in Dushanbe in what was then the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR on 13 January 1967. Details about his origin and upbringing are not known. In 2021, a South African intelligence file listed him as Ukrainian in origin.

Career

Bout had different positions following his discharge from the army base on the source. He launched an air freight business called Air Cess that operated out of Angola according to his personal website.

The business provided services to the US, France, and the United Nations.  During the 1990s, Bout acknowledges having been to Afghanistan on several occasions but he denied dealing with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Bout made shipments for the pre-Taliban government of Afghanistan which later became the Northern Alliance and knew Ahmed Shah Massoud, one of its commanders. During the 1995 Airstan incident, he was involved in negotiations to free a Russian hostage in 1995.

He was reported by a United Nation report saying, ….Bulgarian arms manufacturing companies had exported large quantities of different types of weapons between 1996 and 1998 on the basis of (forged)….  with only one exception, the company Air Cess, owned by Victor Bout, was the main transporter of these weapons from Burgas airport in Bulgaria.

He was formally mentioned in the connection with arms trafficking for arms trafficking. During the mid- 1990s, Imad Kebir was another suspected arms dealer and he was said to have employed Bout’s aircraft to transport weapons to Africa from Eastern European states.

UNITA was covered under Resolution 864 from 1993, a United Nations Security Council embargo prohibiting the importation of arms to Angola. Bout began collaborating with Richard Chichakli in 1993, and the Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates hired Chichakli to be the commercial manager of its new free-trade zone in 1995.

During takeoff in 2002, Bout’s network allegedly delivered surface-to-air missiles to Kenya to be used to attack an Israeli airliner. Bout and Chichakli set up Samar Airlines in Tajikistan to conduct money laundering activities and protect assets from authorities in 2004.

Bout’s strategy of constantly moving location, owning numerous companies, and frequently re-registering aircraft made it hard for authorities to make a case against him, and has never been charged for the alleged African arms deals to which he owes his notoriety.

In July 2004, Bout’s U.S. assets were among those frozen under Executive Order 13348, which illustrates him as a “transporter of weapons, businessman, and dealer of mineral” and cites his close association with Charles Taylor.

Bout was the target of a sting operation organized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in early 2008. On 6 March 2008, he was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand on an Interpol red notice issued by the US.

The Bangkok Criminal Court ruled in his favor, denying the United States request for extradition and citing the political, not criminal, nature of the case on 11 August 2009. Bout was extradited to the US in late 2010.

A co-conspirator of Bout’s, Richard Ammar Chichakli, was extradited to New York on charges that he conspired to buy aircraft in violation of economic sanctions in June 2013.

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