The death of the chairman of Russian oil giant Lukoil Ravil Maghanov on Thursday made the rounds of the world raising a series of questions once again, as he was the eighth executive in the Russian energy sector to die suddenly this year and under unusual circumstances.
Maganov was killed when he fell from the window of the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital where he was being treated, according to Russia’s state-run Interfax news agency. The circumstances of Maganov’s death were confirmed by the Reuters agency, citing two anonymous sources.
However, Lukoil, the company that Maganov helped build, said in a press release that its 67-year-old chairman “died after a serious illness.” The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to CNBC’s request for an official statement.
The circumstances surrounding Maganov’s sudden death have attracted international attention, in part because seven other top Russian energy officials have died prematurely since January this year, according to reports by Russian and international news agencies.
CNBC reports on this strange series of deaths, numbering them in chronological order:
It began in late January, when Leonid Shulman, a top executive at Russian gas giant Gazprom, was found dead in the bathroom of a country house in Leninsky. Russian media group RBC announced his death, but did not say what caused it.
On February 25, another Gazprom executive, Alexander Tyulakov, was also found dead in the same village as Shulman, but in a garage. According to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, investigators found an autographed note near Tyulakov’s body.
Three days after Tyulakov’s death, on February 28, Russian oil and gas billionaire Mikhail Watford, who lived in England, was found hanged in the garage of his country home. At the time, investigators reportedly described Watford’s death as “unexplained” but not suspicious.
On April 18, former vice president of Gazprombank Vladislav Avayev was found dead in his Moscow apartment, along with his wife and daughter. Authorities treated the case as a murder-suicide, Radio Free Europe reported at the time. Gazprombank is Russia’s third largest bank and has close ties to the energy sector.
A day later, on April 19, the former deputy chairman of Novatek, Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer, was also found dead at a country house in Spain. As in the case of Avayev in Moscow, Sergei Protosenia was found dead along with his wife and daughter. Also, as in Avayev’s case, police said it was a murder-suicide, a theory that Avayev’s surviving son has publicly rejected.
In May, the body of billionaire and former Lukoil executive Alexander Shubotin was found in a basement of a country house in the Moscow region. The room where Subotin died was reportedly used for “Jamaican voodoo ceremonies,” Russian news agency TASS reported, citing local authorities.
In July, it was the turn of Yuri Voronov, the managing director and founder of a shipping company working with Gazprom on the Russian energy giant’s Arctic projects, who was found dead after being shot in the swimming pool of his Leninsky residence in the same expensive district of St. Petersburg where both Shulman and Tyulakov were found dead earlier this year.
Source: Capital
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