Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov says on his blog that he’s made offer to buy New Jersey Nets

Russian tycoon says he’s made offer to buy Nets

MOSCOW — Russia’s richest man, an amateur basketball player who made billions in metals, says he wants to buy the New Jersey Nets in exchange for funding the team’s troubled plans to build an arena in Brooklyn.

Mikhail Prokhorov wrote Tuesday on his blog that he wants to improve Russian basketball by getting access to NBA training methods and sending Russian coaches for internships.

Prokhorov said that he sent team shareholders an offer over the weekend. Under the proposal, Prokhorov’s holding company Onexim would obtain a controlling share in the NBA team in return for loaning the money to build a new arena.

The posting says the controlling shares would be obtained for “a symbolic price.”

Nets owner Bruce Ratner faces a crucial December deadline for his plan to build an arena in Brooklyn and move his team there in 2011. The construction needs to break ground by then or lose access to the tax-free bonds financing much of the project.

Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said Wednesday that “we do not have a comment as of yet.”

It was not immediately clear whether NBA regulations permit foreigners to own a team; Chinese businessmen hold a minority share in the Cleveland Cavaliers. Baseball’s Seattle Mariners are owned by the American division of Japan’s Nintendo.

“I don’t think players really care who own the team,” Nets president Rod Thorn said. “Whatever happens, I think it will get resolved in a timely fashion and I don’t think it will have any effect on the players.”

Prokhorov, who owns a share in the Russian basketball team CSKA, was ranked as the country’s richest man in the Russian edition of Forbes, with an estimated fortune of $9.5 billion. He has weathered the global economic crisis better than many of his wealthy compatriots by cashing out of some lucrative assets before the downturn battered commodity markets.

According to Forbes, his fortune shrank by some $7 billion — a breathtaking loss by most standards, but mild in comparison with some Russian oligarchs. Roman Abramovich, who as owner of Chelsea is Russia’s best-known international sports magnate, lost more than $9 billion, and Oleg Deripaska, a rival in Russia’s metals business, lost around $35 billion.

Prokhorov’s interest in basketball isn’t only as a spectator. The 44-year-old was an avid player in his high school and college years.

He shot to prominence in the murky and chaotic early years of privatization deals that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993, the Onexim bank that he headed acquired Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s huge but lumbering and inefficient industrial conglomerates.

Prokhorov’s stewardship saw Norilsk become more efficient and profitable. He resigned as Norilsk chairman in 2007 and sold off his shares for $7.5 billion, but retains substantial interests in other metals companies through Onexim, including shares in gold miner Polyus and Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum company.

Onexim’s other interests include real estate, insurance and energy.

He also cuts a wide swath in the circles of the super-rich, living a lavish lifestyle in such glitzy haunts as the French Alps ski resort of Courchevel.

He was detained by French police in Courchevel for four days in 2007 as part of a prostitution investigation, but was released without charges.

AP Sports Writer Tom Canavan in Newark, N.J., contributed to this report.