Telenor and Alfa Group's telecoms arm, Altimo, will have stakes of about 38% each in the merged entity.

ECONOMIST: Telenor and Alfa are reconciled: A strong signal | The

Now he chairs Pamplona Capital Management, a British private equity firm he founded in 2005, whose clients include Alfa Group.

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Heads Alfa Group, with interests in oil, banking, telecom, retail.

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Russian billionaires Petr Aven and Mikhail Friedman are hoping their Alfa Group can get out of repayment pressure from Deutsche Bank, which provided multibillion-dollar loans to purchase shares in mobile operator VimpelCom.

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After five years, the notoriously sharp-elbowed Alfa Group has settled its differences with Telenor, a largely state-owned Norwegian firm that is its partner in mobile-phone ventures in Russia and Ukraine, called VimpelCom and Kyivstar respectively.

ECONOMIST: Telenor and Alfa are reconciled: A strong signal | The

Bernard Sucher, a veteran Russian banker and chairman of Alfa Capital, a unit of Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group, thinks Russian investors' interest in their own bourses is a sign of the development of the country's financial system.

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