Nikolai Glushkov: who was he, what brought him to the UK and why did he believe Vladimir Putin was out to get him?
FIVE years ago, soon after his close friend Boris Berezovsky was found hanged, Nikolai Glushkov gloomily predicted he was now one of the last on Vladimir Putin’s hit list.
The 68-year-old businessman had been the right-hand man of Mr Berezovsky, a leading critic of Putin, since the Eighties and their fates had been entwined for years.
As a director of Aeroflot, the state airline, and of Mr Berezovsky’s Logovaz car company during the Nineties, Mr Glushkov was one of the Russian oligarch’s closest associates as they made their fortunes in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
But their luck changed with the arrival of Vladimir Putin, and Mr Berezovsky fell out with the new Russian
leader in 2000 and fled to the UK. Mr Glushkov was seized and held on fraud charges that Mr Berezovsky believed were a politically motivated attempt to exact revenge.
Mr Berezovsky believed he was the real target of the Kremlin’s anger and his friend was essentially being held hostage in the top security Lefortovo prison, where he spent five years.
After his release, he fled to the UK and was reunited with Mr Berezovsky and granted political asylum.
When he was seeking political asylum in Britain, Mr Glushkov’s lawyer told a court that his client was “very close” to Berezovsky – “Vladimir Putin’s personal enemy No 1”. When Mr Berezovsky was found dead in an Ascot mansion in 2013, his associate refused to believe it was suicide and said he had been strangled instead. “Too many deaths [of Russian exiles] have been happening,” he said at the time.
Referring to Putin’s alleged “hit list”, Mr Glushkov said: “I don’t see anyone left on it apart from me.”
Mr Glushkov failed to show up at a court in central London on Monday and his body was discovered in southwest London that evening.
While his wife Lyudmila and son live in Moscow, his daughter lives in the UK. His London life did not stop him being pursued from Moscow and he was being sued for £87million by Russian state airline Aeroflot over claims he embezzled the money with Mr Berezovsky.
He was found dead by his daughter Natalia at his home in New Malden. She is reported to have found strangulation marks on his neck – the same fate he believed met his old friend.