Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov dies in Indian hotel

• Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was discovered dead in a hotel in India.
• Antov, 65, fell from a hotel window on Sunday in the city of Rayagada.
• Russian consul in Kolkata said police did not see “criminal element” in his death.

Two days after a friend passed away while on the same vacation, Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was discovered dead in a hotel in India.

The wealthy, who was also a local politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel when they arrived in the eastern state of Odisha.

In the east of Moscow city of Vladimir, Antov was a well-known personality.

After a message showed up on his WhatsApp account in the summer of last year, he denied criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, a number of Russian tycoons have mysteriously passed away, the latest of which was the millionaire. Many of these individuals have publicly criticized the war.

According to reports in Russian media, Mr. Antov, 65, fell from a hotel window on Sunday in the city of Rayagada. Vladimir Budanov, another member of his four-person Russian group, passed away on Friday at the hotel.

Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of Odisha police said Mr. Budanov was found to have suffered a stroke while his friend “was depressed after his death and he too died”. The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”.

Tourist guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Mr. Budanov may have “consumed a lot of alcohol as he had liquor bottles”.

Pavel Antov built the Vladimir Standard meat processing facility, and according to a 2019 Forbes estimate, he is the richest politician and state official in Russia with a net worth of about $140 million (£118 million).

He presided over a committee on agrarian policy and ecology at the Vladimir legislative assembly, where he played a significant role. He passed away under “tragic circumstances,” according to the assembly’s vice chairman Vyacheslav Kartukhin.

Late in June of last year, he seemed to respond to a Russian missile attack on a house in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood that killed a man and injured his mother, seven-year-old daughter, and other family members.

A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account described how the family were pulled out of the rubble: “It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”

The message was deleted and Antov then posted on social media that he was a supporter of the president, a “patriot of my country” and backed the war.

The WhatsApp message had come from someone whose opinion on the “special military operation in Ukraine” he strongly disagreed with, he insisted. It had been posted accidentally on his messenger and was a highly annoying misunderstanding, he said.

Since the start of the conflict, a number of prominent Russian businessmen have perished in enigmatic circumstances.

Ravil Maganov, the CEO of Russia’s largest oil company Lukoil, is believed to have fallen from a Moscow hospital window in September.

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