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Pavel Antov, a Russian lawmaker and businessman who made his fortune in the sausage industry, has died after falling from the third floor of his hotel room while vacationing in India – the latest Russian businessman to die under mysterious circumstances this year.
Antov was found dead outside a hotel in Rayagada district of India’s eastern Odisha region over the weekend, police told local media, two days after one of his traveling companions, Vladimir Bidenov, was found dead at the same hotel. According to local media reports, Bidenov was found unconscious in his hotel room surrounded by empty wine bottles. He was taken to the county hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead.
Odisha Police ordered its Criminal Division to take over the investigation into the “unnatural deaths of two Russian nationals” at Rayagada Police Station tweeted on Tuesday.
Police Commissioner Vivekananda Sharma said Bidenov suffered a stroke while Antov “was depressed afterwards [Bidenov’s] Death and he died too,” the BBC reported. Police told Indian media that Antov’s death appeared to be a suicide.
The Russian Embassy in Delhi confirmed the deaths to Russian media. “The Russian Consulate General in Kolkata is following the case in contact with the local authorities,” the Russian news agency RT India quoted the embassy as saying. “According to the information available to the police, no criminal aspect is seen.”
Antov founded the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant and amassed a fortune — estimated at about $140 million in 2019 — that put him on Forbes’ list of Russia’s richest lawmakers and officials.
He also served in the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir region, adjacent to Moscow, where he was a member of Putin’s United Russia party and chaired the Committee on Agricultural Policy, Nature Management and Ecology.
In June, Antov appeared to criticize a Russian rocket attack on a block of flats in Kyiv, Ukraine, which killed a man and wounded his 7-year-old daughter and her mother, according to the BBC. A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account says about the incident: “It’s extremely difficult to call it anything other than terrorism.”
The message was later deleted and Antov posted on social media that he supports Putin and his invasion. He attributed the earlier post to an “extremely unfortunate misunderstanding” in which he accidentally posted a message from someone he didn’t agree with.
Antov’s colleagues in the legislature offered condolences after news of his death broke. Vyacheslav Kartukhin, the deputy speaker of the regional legislature, wrote on Telegram that he sent his condolences to Antov’s family and friends on behalf of the United Russia bloc after Antov’s death “as a result of tragic circumstances.”
“We appreciated him for both his professionalism and personal qualities – he was sensitive, intelligent and respectful of everyone. As a learned man with a wide horizon, he won everyone over. For the Legislative Assembly, for the entire Vladimir region, the death of Pavel Genrichovich Anton is a serious and irreparable loss,” the speaker of the assembly Vladimir Kiselyov said in a statement, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
Antov celebrated his 65th birthday in India on December 22, Tass reported.
His death is the latest incident this year involving Russian tycoons and high-profile oil and gas industry executives. What follows is a string of grim and unexplained deaths since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine.
In September, the 67-year-old chairman of Russian oil company Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, died after reportedly falling from a window at a Moscow hospital where he was being treated after a cardiac arrest. Conflicting reports were appearing in the Russian media at the time, and it was not clear whether Maganov’s death was the result of suicide, an accident, or something more sinister.
In the first weeks of the invasion, Lukoil made headlines as the only Russian oil producer to call for an end to the war in Ukraine. In a statement released just days after the February 24 invasion, Lukoil expressed “concern at the ongoing tragic events in Ukraine” and called for “an immediate cessation of the armed conflict.”
In April, the body of Sergey Protosenya, a former top executive at gas giant Novatek, was found in a Spanish villa along with that of his wife and their 18-year-old daughter. Spanish news agency Telecinco reported that police found the mother and daughter with stab wounds in separate rooms. Protosenya was found in the yard where he allegedly hanged himself.
In the same month, Vladislav Avayev, a former vice president of Gazprombank, was also found dead in his Moscow apartment along with his wife and daughter.
Mary Ilyushina contributed to this report.