Pavel Antov celebrated his 65th birthday by touring the temples and suspension bridges that connect the tribal communities of Rayagada, a district in the eastern Indian state of Odisha.
That was on December 22.
This Russian billionaire, famous for amassing his fortune thanks to the sausage industry, was spending Christmas in South Asia with a group of friends.
It would be his last vacation because Indian media announced Tuesday that Antov was found dead on the 24th after falling from the third floor of his hotel room.
No further details have been released
.
But the most surprising thing about the case is that, two days before, after the excursion through the region, one of his travel companions, another Russian businessman named Vladimir Bidenov, also appeared dead in the same hotel.
The workers found him unconscious in his room, surrounded by empty wine bottles.
Already in the hospital, the doctors certified his death from a heart attack.
"Antov was very depressed after the death of his childhood friend,"
hotel employees told local press.
Odisha Police Director General Sunil Bansal said that Antov is suspected of jumping from the terrace of his room and that his team is investigating the exact cause behind both his death and that of his friend Bidenov.
The hotel's owner, Koushik Thakkar, has said that Antov, Bydanov and a Russian couple, Mikhail Turov and Natalia Panasenko, checked in on December 21 after flying from New Delhi.
"On the morning of the 22nd, Bydanov died in his room after suffering a heart attack. Antov, who accompanied the body to the crematorium, had been visibly depressed ever since and stopped asking for food. On the morning of December 24, the Our hotel staff in his room, they started the search and discovered the body lying on the terrace of an adjoining one-story building," Thakkar explained.
Antov was an oligarch with an estimated fortune of around $140 million
.
He had lined his pockets with his Vladimir Standard meat processing plant, specializing in sausages.
But he also served as a legislator in the Vladimir region assembly near Moscow, where he was a member of the United Russia party, formerly headed by President Vladimir Putin, and chaired a land policy committee.
After the news of the mysterious death of this businessman and politician, many media quickly recalled that, last June, Antov
criticized a Russian missile attack on a Kiev residential block
that killed a man and injured his seven-year-old daughter. .
"It is extremely difficult to call all of this anything other than terror," he wrote on his social media.
Later, the message was deleted and Antov assured that he supported Putin and his invasion, attributing the previous message to "an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding."
other deaths
Just as the old deleted publication has been rescued, it is inevitable to remember that this year there are already several Russian oligarchs, some of them critical of the invasion of Ukraine, who have died since the war began.
Last week, Alexander Buzakov, head of a major shipyard specializing in the construction of submarines, died suddenly without the Russian authorities having released the cause of death.
In September, the chairman of Russian oil company Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, died after mysteriously falling from a window at a Moscow hospital, where he was receiving treatment after suffering a cardiac arrest.
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
.
Another senior Lukoil manager, Alexander Subbotin, was found dead near Moscow in May after, according to the Russian news agency TASS, visiting a shaman.
Back in September, Anatoly Gerashchenko, former rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute, died in an unspecified accident.
Drowned near Cape Ignatyev, in the city of Vladivostok, Ivan Pechorin, who was the head of the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, appeared.
We must not forget either Sergey Protosenya, a former senior manager of the gas giant Novatek, who was found hanged in April in his villa in Lloret de Mar, in Girona.
His body was found next to that of his wife and his 18-year-old daughter.
The Mossos then pointed out that the main hypothesis they were working with was that of a sexist crime.
Although soon after, Protosenya's son assured that his father was also murdered.
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