Russia, the massacre of managers and oligarchs: one mystery after another

2023-10-24 19:50:37

Vladimir Nekrasov, head of the Board of Directors of Lukoil, whose death from “acute heart failure” was announced today, is the third executive of the Russian oil giant to die suddenly since the start of the war in Ukraine. Since the conflict began, there have been at least 14 unexplained deaths of senior figures in the Russian business world, to which we can add the mysterious death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner militia in August.

Among the latest mysterious deaths is that on July 21 of Anton Cherepennikov, 40, who died following a sudden cardiac arrest. He was the number one of a large Russian IT company, Ics holding, considered very close to the Kremlin secret services, which would have used the company for its surveillance systems for the online activities of Russian citizens. The man was found dead in his office in Moscow.

Sausage magnate and MP Pavel Antov died in India in December 2022, after falling from the third floor of the hotel where he was staying in what was deemed by Indian authorities to be a suicide. Just two days earlier, his friend and traveling companion Vladimir Budanov died of a heart attack on Antov’s 65th birthday. Budanov, 61, had a heart condition, according to police. Alexander Buzakov, director of the conventional submarine shipyards, died suddenly in December. No cause of death reported by authorities.

Anatoly Gerashchenko, former rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute, died in an unexplained accident in September 2022, the institute announced. Chairman of the Lukoil oil company Ravil Maganov died in early September after falling from the window of a Moscow hospital. Entrepreneur Ivan Pechorin, head of the Far Eastern and Arctic Development Company, drowned on September 10 near Ignatyev Point in Vladivostock.

Lukoil manager Alexander Subbotin was found dead near Moscow in May, after being treated with toad venom by a shaman. Gazprom executive Leonid Shulman, head of the transport directorate of Gazprom Invest, was found dead in his dacha in Leninsky, near St. Petersburg on January 30, 2022. Next to his body, investigators found a Goodbye. The following month, on February 25, another Gazprom executive, Aleksandr Tyulakov, was found dead in the garage of his house in the same village. Novaya Gazeta had then spoken of suicide.

The former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avayev, was found dead with his wife and daughter in his home in Moscow on 18 April 2022. The authorities spoke of a murder-suicide. On April 19, Sergey Protosenya, a former manager of the gas producer Novatek, a company partly controlled by Gazprom, was found dead in his home in Lloret de Mar, near Barcelona. The bodies of his wife and daughter were found in his residence, with signs of violence.

Also in this case, the Spanish authorities had concluded that it was a double murder followed by suicide, a version disputed by his son, according to whom it was a triple murder. Russian billionaire of Ukrainian origin Mikhail Watford was found dead in his home in Surrey, England, on February 28, 2022. Vasily Melnikov, 43, head of MedStom, a medical components company, was found dead with his wife, 41, and their two children aged ten and four, in Nizhny Novgorod on March 23 last year.