It was also a sweet deal for Rosneft and Sechin: the newly purchased oilfields were the missing link in Vostok Oil, Sechin’s brainchild and a mammoth $85 billion project that's expected to produce as many as 2 million barrels of oil per day once it's complete in 2030. That sale provided an instant windfall for Khudainatov, enabling him to repay at least $3.9 billion in debt going back to 2014, when NNK acquired oil producer Alliance. Their biggest partnership came in December 2020, when NNK sold enormous oilfields in the Taimyr peninsula in Siberia to Rosneft for $11 billion-$9.6 billion in cash and older oil-producing “tail” assets worth $1.4 billion, which helped turn NNK into Russia’s seventh-largest oil producer in 2021. "And we see that they really keep partnering in a lot of ways." "He warmed the seat for Sechin became confident that Khudainatov was extremely loyal," says Vladimir Milov, a Russian opposition politician and economist who served as Russia’s deputy energy minister in 2002. In a response to written questions about Sechin’s ties to Khudainatov, a representative for Rosneft said that “the request contains a set of unsubstantiated fabrications based on slanderous evidence from anonymous and knowingly biased sources.” (Rosneft did not respond to Forbes’ subsequent question about which points were ‘unsubstantiated fabrications.’) And in July 2013, when Khudainatov left Rosneft, he reportedly met with Putin and gained his approval to set up his own oil company, NNK. Their families are also neighbors, according to an investigation by Russian media outlet Proekt: Khudainatov’s son Aleksey owns a home in Rublyovka next door to properties owned by Sechin and his daughter Inga. In 2010, after two years as Rosneft’s vice president, he was elevated to CEO- reportedly on Sechin’s orders. He worked on Putin's first presidential campaign in 2000 and then as his presidential envoy to a remote region in the Arctic circle. The origins of his fortune lie in Khudainatov’s decades-long relationships with Putin and Sechin.