French chess grandmaster

Joël Lautier (French pronunciation::​; born 12 April 1973) is a French chess grandmaster and FIDE Senior Trainer (2006). He is a two-time French Chess Champion.

Contents

• 1 Chess career
• 2 Personal life
• 3 References
• 4 External links

Chess career

Born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada in 1973, Lautier first major success came in 1986, when he won the World Under-14 Championship. He earned his international master *le in 1988, also winning the World Junior Chess Championship that year. He was awarded his grandmaster *le in 1990. He won the French Chess Championships in 2004 and 2005. He competed in the Chess World Cup 2005, where he was eliminated in the fourth round by Étienne Bacrot.

Lautier is one of the founders of the *ociation of Chess Professionals, and served as its president from 2004 to 2005.

He was a second to Vladimir Kramnik in the Cl*ical World Chess Championship 2000 against Garry Kasparov.

Personal life

As of 2009, Lautier no longer cl*ified himself as a chess professional, but as a businessman working in Russia. He speaks fluent Russian.

Later divorced, he was married to Moldovian Woman Grandmaster Almira Skripchenko from 1997 to 2002.

After his professional playing career he turned to business in 2006 and made use of his connections to Russia which he found useful. He founded his own mergers and acquisitions consultancy RGG (Russia goes global) which specialised in buying and selling *ets in Russia. He also studied at Skolkovo management school in Moscow. He advised several large Russian companies in oil, electricity and pharmaceuticals sectors and acted as a non-executive director for Evropeyskaya Elektrotekhnica, a Russian electronics company. In 2020 he became a non-executive director and member of the supervisory board of the Russian bank Sovcombank. For that reason USA added him in March 2022 to the list of sanctioned people over the war in Ukraine. The same day Anatoly Karpov was added to the US sanctions list with Lautier. French business newspaper Les Echos called US sanctioning Lautier "bizarre" and noted him having already resigned from his position in the bank in 25 February, the day after the bank itself was placed on the sanctions list.

References

External links

• Joel Lautier player profile and games at Chessgames.com