There may be a scheme behind the mysterious suicide of a top manager at Gazprom…

Throughout the past year, top managers of Russian oil and gas companies have died one after another under suspicious circumstances. At the end of February 2022, Alexander Tyulyakov, deputy general director for corporate security of the Gazprom Unified Settlement Center, allegedly committed suicide. He was found dead in an annex garage in the guarded corporate village of Gazprom Leninsky in the Vyborg district of the Leningrad region; a suicide note was found next to the corpse.

Two months later, 51-year-old vice-president of Gazprombank Vladislav Avaev was found dead in an apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, next to the bodies of his wife and minor daughter. The TASS agency, citing its source, reported that, according to investigators, Avaev himself killed his wife and daughter, and then committed suicide.

Even a year later, there is no clarity about the causes of these deaths, the results of the investigation, or the response of state-owned companies to them. Novaya Gazeta Europe, together with Transparency International – Russia, found that these top managers worked in structures that, as we assume, are associated with financial fraud on multi-billion dollar contracts with Gazprom, the beneficiaries of which were the family of the deputy chairman of the gas monopoly and his close friends – people from the special services and the military.