Jon Hellevig

Jon Hellevig is working with practical legal matters advising foreign investors in Russia and is a co-founder and partner-in-charge at the law firm Hellevig, Klein & Usov

In the late ‘90s Jon Hellevig established Avenir in Moscow which consisted of a legal advisory, accountancy service and executive search. Today these companies have evolved to become the Avenir Group of companies with the law firm Hellevig, Klein & Usov; Avenir Corporate, accounting and business administration outsourcing; and Avenir Executive Search. Mr Hellevig has been actively working on the Russian market since 1990 in various areas of corporate law and financial administration.

Hellevig deals in particular with investment consulting, corporate governance and investor protection issues. Hellevig’s field of specialization is Russian tax law. He is also active in scientific work on the philosophy of law and presently involved in a study of the coming about of Russian law and rule-by-justice issues in Russia.

Jon Hellevig has published several books on Russian tax and labor laws in addition to contributing with white papers on various topics in Russian law. He regularly lectures at international scientific and investor seminars on these topics.

Before entering the Russian market he worked at banks in Finland, first in legal positions, but later in more finance related and managerial positions. Jon has a University degree in Law from the University of Helsinki, Finland (1985). In 1998 he acquired an MBA with the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et des Chaussees and University of Bristol Graduate School of International Business with KPMG European Training Center, 1998

Some personal notes

Jon Hellevig is multi-lingual with respect to the following four languages: English, Russian, Swedish (mother tongue) and Finnish (native); he also has a working knowledge of Spanish, French and German

Jon Hellevig is married with Tiina Hellevig and they have two daughters, Helenika and Pauline. Jon’s native tongue is Swedish, Tiina’s is Finnish, Helenika’s is English (although formally it is Swedish) and Pauline’s is anything between Finnish, Catalan and Spanish. – Tiina takes care of her daily routines in Spanish, Helenika in Spanish and English, Jon in Russian, English and Finnish, and Pauline in Catalan (but is engaged in her active daily correspondence in the virtual world in Finnish). Finnish seems to be the strongest language at family dinners, providing kind of unity in manifold. - Maybe this bag of competition between languages in the small family helps to explain Jon’s orientation towards a competitive philosophy of language. – The language of friendships par excellence is Russian, for Jon it is a language where he thinks without accent, while the print-out is definitely of worse quality.

Most of the family lives in Barcelona, Spain while Jon has been spotted living in Moscow, St.Petersburg and Barcelona, various airports of Europe also compete for place of residency, while the train between Helsinki and Moscow is what really feels like home.

Home can also be defined as a place where one is made to feel at home just by coming with the right company (and I am sure that even just alone), and for Jon such a place is definitely a village in the Ural mountains, Azikeevo in Bashkortostan. The place really proves how much more there is to be found in a small genuine village than the metropolises of today – although New York is not bad either.

What Jon really longs for would be to know how to sing, and all who hear him frequently sing agree without any hesitation.