András Szép on his yacht, photo courtesy of Szép family, used with permission
András Szép (1957-2024), was one of a group of talented metal merchants who came to prominence – and survived – from the era of 1990s post-communism.
I came to know him through our shared interest in rhenium (at that time one of the more minor of minor metals traded by members of The Minor Metals Trade Association).
Unlike me, András was a native Russian speaker. He was born in Izhevsk, Udmurtia in USSR, to a Hungarian father (born in Bucharest, Romania) and a Christian Tatar mother (born in Kazan, Tatarstan). Both were accomplished engineers in the days of Soviet scientific endeavour who had been transferred to what was then a closed city as well as the centre of the military-industrial and metallurgical complex of the USSR. Of mixed heritage and a life-long traveller, András was also fluent in Hungarian, German and English — a combination that would serve him well in the minor metals trade.
MMTA members will have met András over the last thirty years at the many conferences and meetings he attended – not always but often as a member, which he was intermittently. But no one epitomises the era better than Andras in terms of bridging the worlds of Central Asia and Russia with the West.
His particular strength as a Russian speaker was to gain the trust of big organizations in oil and nuclear who needed either to source – or recycle – minor metals or secondary/waste products. These included precious metals-containing catalysts, molybdenum oxides and concentrates, rare earth oxides, and latterly U3O8. As many know, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan remain critical suppliers of uranium to the West.
András is survived by his children Lona (48), Nikolai (42) and Gregory (31), and partner Dilya Djuraeva. Andras’s late wife, Marina Glushkova, an accomplished geologist, also known to members of the MMTA, died in 2008.
Nikolai Szép worked alongside his father in his Austria-based family company SEKOM Handelsges.m.b.H & Co. for the last ten years. He is a graduate of Imperial College in London in Life Sciences, speaks fluent English, and is well placed to run the company’s affairs, which he will continue to do.
Like many other metal people, and despite being born in a landlocked part of the world, András developed a passion for the sea. This included owning a Racer Cruiser Yacht with friends and competing in the Rolex Fastnet Yacht Race. When I met him at MMTA/Project Blue’s presentation at The Royal Society of Chemistry in October 2023, he mentioned how much he was looking forward to a forthcoming sailing trip. In fact, both he and Nikolai found that with modern connections they could both work and sail at the same time, which they did for 2-3 months of the year.
In some ways his passing marks the beginning of the end of an era in the metals trade; a period in which the central experience of metal traders was the ending of the Soviet Union and how to survive it.
András died of a heart attack on 6th April 2024 while on the way to the airport for a holiday prior to the recent MMTA Singapore Conference which he was hoping to attend.
The funeral service will take place on 30th April 2024, please contact the MMTA admin@mmta.co.uk for details.
By Anthony Lipmann
for the Minor Metals Trade Association
