Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich will be hosting what promises to be one of the most extravagant bashes anywhere to see in the new decade.

He and his girlfriend Daria Zhukova, are expected to spend up to $4.8m on a beach party for 250 people on the Caribbean resort island of Saint Barthélemy.

The London Times reports that the singer Prince is to perform for them for a fee said to be $760,000.

Billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia’s richest man well-known as a sports fan, could become the first foreign owner of a major US basketball team after making a bid for the New Jersey Nets.

Prokhorov had offered to fund a new $700m stadium for the NBA team in New York and he would then acquire the Nets for a symbolic $1 stake.

He boasts that if his move is successful, it would be the first time a National Basketball Association club would come under foreign control.

Roman Abramovich, has spent $89million on a luxurious Caribbean estate in one of the most expensive private home sales of all time.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the property has Balinese bungalows with ocean views, tennis courts, swimming pools and music and dining pavilions.

“It’s very open bungalows, and it’s like you’re basically living on a beach,” the former owner says.

For most of the decade, Russian billionaires spent hundreds of millions of dollars on boats, jets, expensive art and the occasional football team.

But, despite strained bank accounts and public outrage, the tycoons have been loath to part with their expensive trinkets, choosing instead to hunker down and wait for better days.

To be sure, these are not happy days for the country’s superrich.

In Forbes magazine‘s latest ranking of the world’s wealthiest people, Russia’s billionaires had an estimated collective loss of $369 billion last year, and two-thirds fell from the list altogether.

Caviar for patients recovering from a blood test, psychoanalysis at 10,000 dollars per hour: nothing is too much for ailing billionaires at the Neo Vita clinic in Moscow’s swishest suburb.

For the clinic’s founder, Artyom Tolokonin, ensuring good health for the capital’s super-rich inhabitants is even better for his pocket book.

The 33-year-old psychoanalyst says that about a dozen residents of the Rublyovka neighbourhood — dubbed Moscow’s Beverly Hills — are paying for year-round treatments costing as much as a million dollars (636,000 euros) a time. [...]

Visitors pass a police post and surveillance cameras, before having their street shoes clad in clean overshoes, and entering a hallway gently illuminated by liquid-like jets of light.

Bill Gates is now only the third richest man with a net worth of $58 billion. Mexican telecom mogul, Carlos Slim Helú, trumps Gates by $2 billion.

Had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo!, Gates would have kept the number one spot, which is now filled by Warren Buffet.

Naturally, the list had no shortage of Andrei’s, Sergei’s or Dimitri’s. However, it only places three Russian billionaires in the top 20.

Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, and Alexei Mordashov all share the title of “self-made” and each have made their fortune in aluminum.