Nuri Katz was a 24-year-old college student when he moved to Moscow in 1990 from his native Moscow. Though he didn’t plan to stay long, he ended up living there for two decades—long enough to watch the Soviet Union come apart at the seams.
“I would have looked at you like you were crazy if you’d told me it was going to happen,” the founder of Apex Capital Partners told Fortune in an interview, calling in from a financial compliance conference somewhere in his perpetual blur of travel. “I watched the Soviet Union fall apart, and it fell apart because Ronald Reagan outspent them and they went into such huge debt that they spent themselves out of a country.”
The veteran of what he calls the “investor immigration” sector—helping wealthy individuals move their residence from one country to another—said he sees ominous signs now. “I lived through hyperinflation,” Katz said, “I don’t think people understand how dangerous that is, once the lid comes off and they have to start printing money.”
Thirty-four years later, Katz’s Apex Capital Partners is one of the world’s leading Citizenship by Investment advisory firms, helping wealthy clients from China, the Middle East, Africa, and increasingly, the United States, obtain second passports and diversify assets abroad. He has watched empires wobble from close range his entire adult life. And when he looks at America right now, he sees something he has never seen before in his industry, which he says wouldn’t exist without the big changes that shook the ultrawealthy of Hong Kong in the 1980s, when the UK colony handing over to the mainland became a reality.
