Pavel Antov, a well-known Russian businessman, has been found dead in a hotel in the eastern state of Orissa, India.Two days earlier, a close friend who had accompanied Paul on the trip was also found dead in the hotel.
PAVEL and his friends were in the eastern city of India and had recently celebrated their birthday. He was also active in local politics in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. An anti-war WhatsApp message after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was attributed to Pavel Antov, but he denied it.
The death of multi-millionaire Pavel Antov has been preceded by the deaths of several Russian figures who openly criticized Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Reports in Russian media said that 65-year-old Pavel Antov died due to fell from a hotel window in Raigad city on Sunday. Vladimir Budanov, another member of his four-member Russian group, also died in the hotel on Friday.
Orissa Police Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma said that Budanov suffered a stroke while his friend “was depressed after his death and he also died.”
Alexey Adamkin, an official of the Russian consulate in Kolkata, told the news agency ‘Tass’ that the police did not see any criminal element in these tragic events.
Tourist guide Jitender Singh told reporters that “Mr Budanov may have drunk too much because bottles of alcohol were found in his room.”
Pavel Antov founded a meat processing plant called Vladimir Standard, and in 2019 Forbes estimated his wealth at $140 million and was among the richest people in Russia’s list of lawmakers and civil servants.
He played an important role in the Legislative Assembly in the city of Vladimir and chaired a committee on agricultural policy and the environment. Vyacheslav Kartukhin, deputy chairman of the Vladimir Assembly, said his death was “tragic”.
In late June last year, they apparently responded to a Russian missile attack on a residential block in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskiy district, killing a man and injuring his seven-year-old daughter and her mother.
A WhatsApp message on Antu’s account describing how the family was pulled from the wreckage “is extremely difficult to call all this anything other than terrorism.”
The message was later deleted, and Pavel Antov later announced his support for President Putin in a social media post, saying he was a patriot and fully supported the war in Ukraine.
He asserted that the WhatsApp message came from someone who had a personal opinion he disagreed with about a ‘special military operation in Ukraine’.
He said the message was mistakenly posted on his messenger and was a “very annoying misunderstanding.” Since the start of the war, several high-profile Russian businessmen have died under mysterious circumstances.
In September, the head of the Russian oil company Lukoil, Ravel Maganov, fell from a hospital window in Moscow.