A Russian businessman has died in Moscow after falling out of a window, according to reports in local media.
Mikhail Rogachev, the former vice-president of Yukos, once one of Russia’s most prominent oil and gas companies, was found at the entrance to his living quarters at the weekend, having sustained injuries characteristic of having fallen from a great height, Russian media stated.
News channels said that Rogachev, 64, lived on the tenth floor, and referred to the death as a suicide, claiming that he left a suicide note and had been suffering from cancer. Police are said to be “studying” the note.
Rogachev had a long career in some of post-Soviet Russia’s most prominent companies.
In 2007, after leaving Yukos, he became deputy general director of Vladimir Potanin’s mining company Norilsk Nickel. Potanin, now Russia’s richest man, has been sanctioned by the UK since 2022 as part of Putin’s inner circle.
The next year, Rogachev moved to the private investment fund Onexim Group as executive director, and later, from 2011 to 2015, headed the Russian Foundation for Technological Development.
Since 2022 there have been several suspicious deaths of prominent members of Russia’s oil and gas industry. Top managers at both Gazprom and Lukoil have died under strange circumstances in the period after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Sergei Protosenya, 55, a former senior manager of the gas company Novatek, was found dead alongside his family in Spain in 2022
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Last October Vladimir Nekrasov, the chair of the board of directors of the Russian oil company Lukoil, died at the age of 66, allegedly the result of heart failure. Another Lukoil billionaire, Alexander Subbotin, 43, was found dead in May 2022 — he was said to have consulted a shaman before taking toad venom as a hangover cure — while in April the same year, Sergei Protosenya, 55, a former senior manager of the gas company Novatek, was found dead alongside his family in Spain.
Shortly before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a Gazprom executive, Leonid Shulman, 60, was found dead near St Petersburg. In total there have been at least 50 deaths that could be classed as suspicious since Shulman’s death.
Leonid Shulman, a Gazprom executive, was found dead near St Petersburg in 2022
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Yukos itself has an complicated history: the Yukos case was a pivotal moment in Russia’s modern history, a dispute between the oil and gas company controlled by the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now lives in exile in London, and the Russian state, which sought to rein in its influence and subordinate it to the state. After Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003, Yukos was dismantled, throwing shareholders into long term conflict with the Kremlin.
The late opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s team recently accused another key figure at Yukos, Leonid Nevzlin, of being involved in attacks on Navalny associates.