Sunday, October 20, 2024

Former Russian oil executive found dead after ‘fall’

ANOTHER OLIGARCH AND AN OPEN WINDOW

Our Foreign Staff
Sun, October 20, 2024 

Mikhail Rogachev was found dead in Moscow - Nexta TV


A former Russian oil executive has been found dead after apparently falling from the window of his Moscow flat.

Mikhail Rogachev was found outside his 10th-story apartment in Moscow with injuries consistent with a fall, Russian media reported.

Russian news agencies said authorities were treating his death as a suicide.


Telegram channels close to the Russian security services said his body was discovered by an agent of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, who was walking the dog of a senior spymaster in the building’s courtyard on Saturday morning.

The 64-year-old was a former vice-president of Yukos, the oil giant that was broken up and after its billionaire owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned after challenging Vladimir Putin.

He went on to work as executive director of the Onexim group, oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov’s investment vehicle, and later deputy general director of Norilsk Nickel, a mining giant.

He is the latest of nearly a dozen Russian energy executives to die in mysterious circumstances over the past two years.

Leonid Shulman, the head of the transport service at Gazprom Invest, which handles investment projects for state-owned gas giant, was found dead in a cottage north of St Petersburg in January 2022.

Alexander Tyulakov, another executive at Gazprom, was found dead in the garage of his St Petersburg home on February 25 that year, the morning after Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian media reported.

Later that year Ravil Magonov, the chairman of Lukoil, an oil giant, died after falling out of the window of a Moscow hospital.

Vladimir Nekrasov, who succeeded him as the chair of the Lukoil board, died in October last year of heart failure.

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