by Michele Farina
Antov, 65, a meat and charcuterie entrepreneur, was found dead on Christmas Day. The Indian authorities and the suicide trail: Two days earlier, a friend had died in the same hotel. The Russian Embassy: Nothing suspicious
The Escape: Along with the more or less excellent stories of prominent Russian citizens who even timidly dared to criticize the moves of Tsar Vladimir Putin, there is the last mysterious (perhaps forced) act of their lives: escaping the window. The new entry on this flight list was named Pavel Antov and was a very wealthy MP from Vladimir (a town 200 km from Moscow) who was an activist in the party of the eponymous Tsar, United Russia, and a patron of the arts and a sausage seller. Last summer, according to agency news, he publicly labeled the attacks on Ukraine as terrorists, only to back down on the chickpeas and express his absolute confidence in the Lord of Moscow. His lifeless body was found thousands of kilometers from home on Christmas Day under the window of the room he occupied on the third floor of a hotel in Rayagada, Odisha state, India.
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Antov, a psychiatrist by training who studied in St. Petersburg, had become wealthy in post-Soviet Russia (Forbes magazine credited him with a fortune of 180 million euros in 2019), first trying his hand at a pawn shop and then in meat and sausages. Jovial and hyperactive, he loved to travel and was in India with a group of four friends to celebrate his 65th birthday. Few, rare messages have come in from Odisha, a state of 43 million people overlooking the Bay of Bengal. The guide accompanying the Russians would have spotted Antov in a pool of blood on the ground under his window. Two days earlier, the group had already lost Vladimir Budanov, a friend (how close he is not known) of Antov, who was found dead in his hotel room. According to Indian investigators investigating the incident, quoted by broadcaster Ndtv, the Vladimir industrialist jumped into the void at Christmas, shocked by his friend’s disappearance. Together they even planned a large chicken farm, but fate (or the Kremlin?) would have had a hand in it and interrupted the business partnership and friendship. The Russian Embassy in India has said that Indian police have not found any criminal evidence in the deaths of the two Russian citizens.
Of course, friendship is a very serious matter, and life’s falls are endless. But the barbaric game of coincidences and the escape from the window of the Russians, who are not perfectly head-aligned, awaken new memories. In September, the CEO of Lukoil, one of Russia’s two oil giants, was ejected from the sixth floor of a Moscow hospital: Ravil Maganov, 67, and in the days of his disappearance Masch, a construction site with good sources in the Russian police, claimed he was Manager is being treated for heart problems and has been diagnosed with a form of depression. The state agency Tass had spoken of a heart attack and said Maganov had taken antidepressants. Not enough to stop him from jumping out the window.
Inner depression or pressure from above (or behind)? Last March, the Lukoil Board of Directors issued a statement calling for a speedy end to the armed conflict in Ukraine and expressing its sincere closeness to all the victims. It was not the war that ended quickly, but the existence of Maganov. His death, wrote Fabrizio Dragosei and Davide Casati in Corriere, would only cause some confusion if it did not come after a series of more or less obscure suicides and incidents that began before the February invasion and then gradually became more frequent. From Leonid Schulman to Sergey Protasenya, a key figure in the gas sector who was found dead in a holiday resort in Spain along with his wife and daughter. The murder weapon: an axe.
A group flying out the window is a more complicated and less believable way to end it all or stage a family suicide. More clearly, so to speak, the disappearance of Dan Ropoport, a Latvian made rich in Russia and vocal critic of the Putin government, who stormed out of a Washington building on the eve of August 15 with an orange hat on his head, flip-flops and in his pocket $2,620 in cash. Vladimir’s charcuterie king followed a similar trajectory (without flip-flops) and flew out of a window in the distant Indian city of Rayagada, in despair at the death of a fellow passenger. Was fate (or the Kremlin?) involved?
December 27, 2022 (change December 27, 2022 | 15:12)
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