Career
He is also rector of the National Mineral Resources University in Saint St. Petersburg. Litvinenko has been the rector of the National Mineral Resources University since the 1990s. He oversaw Vladimir Putin"s dissertation work in 1996, which is alleged to include significant amounts of plagiarism and is speculated perhaps to have not even been written by Putin (ie that he paid somebody to write it for him).
Litvinenko has been criticised for not spotting the plagiarism.
Litvinenko was Putin"s political campaign manager in 2000 and 2004. On June 11, 2014, he was given an honorary doctorate by the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Saxony, Germany.
Litvinenko owns nearly 15% of PhosAgro, a phosphate mining company in the Arctic. The mine had been at one time partly owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
He claims that he was paid in shares for some consulting that he did in 2004 and that this "did not contradict any laws".
Phosagro was floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 2011 and Litvinenko was listed among its new owners, as chairman. When Litvinenko owned 5%, the stock was worth about $260 million. In April 2014, he acquired a further 4.9% from Andrey Guryev, who controls the company, for $269 million.