He was 25 when, in his native Russia, he built a banking and real estate empire worth $300 million. To protect himself, he hired a 250-man security force, mainly ex-KGB officers and generals, but one night in Hungary, his own guards kidnapped him. In 1992, he escaped to the United States and lost all his businesses. The Chief Military Attorney General (the ex-investigation department of the KGB) accused him of embezzling $8.1million from the Russian Exchange Bank, the bank that he himself had founded. As he says in his book, “Defiance”, the FBI informed his lawyer that the American branch of the Russian mafia had a contract out on his life. “What I didn’t know then was that the FBI had sold us [he and his wife] out to the Russians,” he writes in his autobiography.

Alex Konanykhin talks fast and in Spanish. But with a strong Slavic accent. He’s 45 and the story, which he says is all in the past, is completed with his arrest by the US Immigration Service (his visa wasn’t valid), a later trial for immigration fraud, 13 months in a prison in Virginia and, finally, a judicial battle which reversed the original decision and ended with the longed-for granting of political asylum.

At the moment, Konanykhin is living in Argentina. He’s CEO of KMG International (KMGi), the interactive production company he founded in 1997 which grosses $10 million a year. In 2011, the firm launched software that monitors the work of virtual teams distributed around the world and controls outsourced tasks to avoid overbilling. “My business partner, Silvina Moschini, and I had taken some time off to travel. But we needed a tool to co-ordinate the work of our employees with the same efficiency as if we had gone to the office every day,” he says. Thus, the Transparent Billing application was born, with which he hopes to make $1,700 million a year.

Because, later on, I’m hoping to base a more complete operation here. I’d like to bring British and American jobs here. I saw the opportunity to outsource jobs in Argentina jobs that can be done by teleworkers. With this tool it’s easy to control the work of human resources all around the world as if they were at the other side of the corridor. This shifting of jobs from London, New York and Washington, contributes to the modernization process of the local economy.

It cost $400,000. We keep improving it and are now entering the commercial phase. As regards licensing, we can match the income of SalesForce [developer of the CRM cloud computing software, a benchmark in the IT industry], which has a turnover of $1,700 million a year.

For entrepreneurs, crises also bring opportunities. They are times of structural changes; it’s easier to introduce new and effective solutions.

Definitively, it’s longer lasting and more profound. Many countries have suffered devastating depressions but, at a world level, it’s the first time that we’ve seen such a structural crisis. I spend a lot of time in Spain and I see the effects, for example, in Barcelona, from the ‘For Sale’ and ‘For Rent’ signs in the offices, to the demonstrations caused by the high level of unemployment and the cuts in social security. The solvency of a lot of companies is in doubt.

It’s the most probable scenario, unless the continent’s businesses use this time of uprooting in the United States and Europe to take advantage by offering more economical solutions.

In this century, national prosperity depends, to a great extent, on whether the country modernizes or looks backwards. One of the reasons why we are in the outsourcing business is because we believe that bringing to Argentina IT, design and other jobs related to the systems will increase salaries in the country and contribute to modernizing the economy.

Argentina isn’t very friendly to foreign companies. The bureaucracy is incredible and the restrictions on the exportation of capital are discouraging. In times of global business, when companies choose where to establish production, financial centres and headquarters, Argentina doesn’t even appear at the bottom of the list. Now, the President has the opportunity to change the situation. But it remains to be seen whether it will be a priority on her agenda.

He studied Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), but he was expelled for starting his own private construction company, which was against the communist ethos. It didn’t bother him: he continued being an entrepreneur and became one of the richest millionaires in Russia. He was successful thanks to the economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachov’s Perestroika. By 1992, with Boris Yeltsin 

(who Konanykhin was close to) in power, the KGB already had him in their sights.

I became a target for different types of criminals. When the KGB kidnapped me, I managed to escape unharmed. But they captured all my businessmen. Later, they took control of Russia, and for some years they pursued me around the world. I was luckier than hundreds of Russian bankers and businessmen who were murdered during the “bloody nineties”. Luckily, that’s all in the past.

When I met him, he still wasn’t president, but a pariah who had been expelled from the

Government Politburo for having challenged the General Secretary of the Party. There was an age difference and we came from very different social backgrounds. But we shared a common interest: fighting the communist system. I backed his rise to power without any expectations. He himself was surprised when he took power. That kind of conversion, from pariah to tsar isn’t typical in Russian history.

In 2012, our plan is to have hundreds of programmers, who will work for American companies. Argentina has a lot of qualified professionals, here and abroad, who we can offer teleworking jobs in the United States and the United Kingdom. The next project is to develop local offices with programmers, designers and IT services and bring new jobs using Transparent Billing.

Konanykhin asked for political asylum in the United States. Immigration officials arrested him for having an invalid visa. He was in prison for 13 months. Until he won the judicial appeal.

Close to ex-president Boris Yeltsin, he fled the country, pursued, he says, by the Russian mafia. The Military Prosecutor (ex-KGB) arrested him for embezzling $8.1million.

**Camila Fronzo