On April 18 in Moscow, Vladislav Avaev, former chairman of Gazprombank, controlled by the energy giant Gazprom, was found dead, a gun in his hand, alongside his wife and their 13-year-old daughter. The next day, Sergey Protosenya, former general manager of the gas producer Novatek, was in turn found hanged in his villa in Spain, near his wife and daughter, visibly stabbed.
“Both were found deceased alongside their families, which is why police believe these are murder-suicide cases,” advances the american magazine Newsweek, who nevertheless wonders about the murky circumstances of these deaths. Avaev and Protosenya are indeed the latest in a long list of Russian oligarchs who have allegedly killed themselves since the beginning of the year.
In total, the American media identifies six of these businessmen. It all started in January with the death of Leonid Shulman, a senior Gazprom executive, found in the bathroom of a cottage in the Saint Petersburg region. Next are billionaire Vasily Melnikov, tycoon Mikhail Watford and Gazprom executive Alexander Tyulyakov, all of whom died after February 24, when the war began. All the investigations are currently exploring the thesis of suicide.
For the Italian daily The print, this macabre list does not leave much room for doubt: it would be murders and not suicides. “The number of Russian executives linked to Gazprom or other big gas companies who are dying is appalling, provides the media. All of these stories have fuzzy sides, inconsistencies, signs of extreme violence.”
“Those who touch the gas pipes die”
“These senior state managers […] surely knew the financial arrangements, the company’s accounts, the financial flows. They had information about the resale of Russian gas to Europe, which has always determined the processes of influence and interference of the Kremlin in Western democracies”. says the Turin daily.
Although there is currently no evidence to qualify these deaths as murders, the transalpine media concludes: “Those who touch electric wires, or rather gas pipes, die.”