Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was found dead in an Indian hotel two days after a friend of his died during the same trip.
The pair were visiting the eastern Indian state of Odisha and the millionaire, who was also a politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel.
Antov was a well-known figure in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. Last summer, he denied criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account.
The millionaire’s death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticized the war.
Russian media reports said Antov, 65, fell from a hotel window in the town of Rayagada on Sunday. His friend Vladimir Budanov died at the hotel on Friday (23).
Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of the Odisha police said that Budanov had suffered a stroke and that his friend “was depressed after his death and that’s why he also died”.
Russian consul in Calcutta Alexei Idamkin told Tass news agency that Indian police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”.
Tour guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Budanov may have “consumed too much alcohol because he had liquor bottles”.
Pavel Antov founded the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant, and in 2019, Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at around $140 million (approximately R$ 730 million) at the top of the list of richest legislators and civil servants in Russia .
He played an important role in the Legislative Assembly of Vladimir, heading a committee on land policy and ecology. Deputy Speaker of the Assembly Viatcheslav Kartukhin said he died in “tragic circumstances”.
At the end of last June, Pavel Antov appeared to react against a Russian missile attack on a residential block in Kiev’s Shevchenkivski district, which left a man dead and his seven-year-old daughter and mother injured.
A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account described how the family was pulled from the rubble: “It is extremely difficult to call all this anything other than terror”.
The message was deleted and Antov posted on social media that he was a supporter of President Vladimir Putin, a “patriot of my country” and said he supported the war.
He insisted that the WhatsApp message “came from someone whose opinion of the special military operation in Ukraine he strongly disagreed with”. He added that the message had been accidentally posted on his Messenger and it was a very annoying misunderstanding.
Other famous Russian tycoons have died under mysterious circumstances since the beginning of the war.
In September, the head of Russian oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, apparently fell from a window in a hospital in Moscow.
– This text was originally published here.
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