In both cases, the alarm was raised by the slain families’ surviving child.
Former Kremlin official and Gazprombank vice-president Vladislav
Avayev, 51, was found dead in his luxury Moscow apartment alongside the
bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter on Monday. It appeared he
had shot them before turning the gun on himself. The bodies were found
by distraught 26-year-old daughter Anastasia after she was unable to get
hold of her family.
The following day former Novatek deputy chairman Sergey Protosenya,
55, his wife Natalya, 53, and 18-year-old daughter, Maria, were found dead at their Spanish mansion. The scene suggested
the women had been stabbed, before Protosenya hanged himself in the
garden. The alarm was raised by the couple’s teenage son, who was
staying in France, after he was unable to reach his parents at their
home in the coastal town of Lloret de Mar.
Spanish investigators are now reportedly trying to work out whether
the Protosenya deaths were the result of a domestic murder-suicide or an
organized hit.
According to Spanish website El Punt Avui, Protosenya’s estimated fortune was $440 million. Alongside Western pressure on oligarchs, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to target the billionaires too, during a rant about Westernized Russians last month.
He warned: "I do not judge those with villas in Miami or the French
Riviera. Or [those] who can't get by without oysters or foie gras or
so-called 'gender freedoms'…The problem is they mentally exist there,
and not here, with our people, with Russia."
He went on to call for a "self-purification" of the nation and there were reports of an "exodus" of private jets, apparently fleeing Russia in the wake of his comments."
Newsweek
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