Arsenal’s second largest shareholder, Alisher Usmanov, owns 30.4% of the club and is worth an estimated $16bn, so how did the 64-year-old make his money and are all those stories about him true?

2. Kommersant

In recent years, Usmanov started investing in the media. He bought Russian newspaper Kommersant, which he still owns today.

In 2011, there were a series of protests against what some Russians believed was vote-rigging in parliamentary elections. Usmanov’s magazine “Kommersant Vlast” published an article titled “Victory of United ballot-stuffers” when Putin’s United Russia party won the election.

In the article, there was a picture of a ballot paper from the vote with “Putin, go f**k yourself” written on it, with the caption: “A correctly filled out ballot recognised as invalid.”

Usmanov sacked both the editor of the magazine and the head of the publisher’s holding company. He said the issue “bordered on petty hooliganism” and the head of the Kommersant publishing house also resigned.

There was a lot of backlash from journalists who felt they were no longer able to speak their minds. 60 journalists who stayed on at Kommersant later wrote a letter to Usmanov, saying (via BBC): “We are being compelled to be cowards, which is unworthy and unproductive…We regard [the editor’s] dismissal as an act of intimidation aimed at preventing any critical words about Vladimir Putin.

“We take particular offense at the attempt to present the dismissal of a man for his professional position as a fight for the purity of the Russian language. This is the same kind of fabrication that offended people at the election.”

Usmanov responded that he could understand the journalists standing up for their managers, but “Kommersant Vlast is a respectable, independent, sociopolitical publication”. 

He rejected an outside offer to buy the publication on the same day.