This event will be hosted in person only. RSVP to attend. Please RSVP by no later than 9 am on February 12.
American businessman Michael Calvey dedicated his new book, Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State, to his fellow inmates of cell 604 of the infamous Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow. Chairman of Baring Ventures, overseeing funds managing around $5 billion, when Calvey was arrested by the Putin regime in 2019, US Ambassador to Moscow John J Sullivan said "The Russian government had arrested the most successful and prominent U.S. business leader and investor in Russia, Michael Calvey, on a phony charge.” Join us for the next installment of the seminar series Russia and Its Neighbors: In Search of a New Paradigm, where Dr. Yevgenia Albats will explore what led Mr. Calvey from being Putin's loyalist to Putin’s prisoner.
This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Russian and Slavic Studies.
Michael “Mike” Calvey is an American investor and entrepreneur based in Europe. An innovation enthusiast with three decades of experience across a range of industries, notably in fintech, he is currently chairman of Baring Ventures, a private equity group with long-term stakes in Kaspi, Revolut, and Plata.
He is the author of a memoir about his nearly three decades working and living in Russia, Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey From Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State (2025).
Born in 1967 in Wisconsin and raised in Oklahoma, Calvey studied computer science and business at the University of Oklahoma and finance at the London School of Economics. He started his professional career in 1989 as an investment banking analyst at Salomon Brothers in New York, where he focused on capital markets and M&A transactions in the U.S. energy industry.
From 1991 to 1994, Calvey worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London, where he made investments in and arranged project financing for several of the first joint-venture projects in the oil sector of the former Soviet Union, including projects owned by Conoco, British Gas, Gulf Canada, and others.
In 1994, Calvey was part of a team backed by Baring Asset Management (BAM) to raise a private equity fund, The First NIS Regional Fund, focused on Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union. The fund's anchor investors were the EBRD, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), TIAA-CREF, and Fidelity. In 1997, together with several colleagues, Calvey founded Baring Vostok Capital Partners to assume the management responsibility from BAM for the First NIS Regional Fund. Baring Vostok also subsequently became part of Baring Private Equity International, a group of funds with investment operations primarily in Asia and Latin America.
