Will Princess Pushy help solve the murder of her toyboy tycoon?
The scene might have come straight from the pages of a crime novel. A stony-faced Moscow lawyer flies discreetly to London with a small package of such importance that it must be delivered in person. Its intended recipient is a glamorous British Princess once said to have been embroiled in an intimate relationship with a murdered oligarch, and he intends to hand it to her when they meet in her private quarters at Kensington Palace.
There was nothing fictional about the mission the lawyer, Karen Nersisyan, embarked on last week, however.
he had been sent to Britain by the family of the furniture tycoon Mikhail Kravchenko, who was shot dead in 2012 aged just 46, in a classic Russian Mafia-style ‘hit’, six years after he was scandalously photographed walking hand-inhand with Princess Michael of Kent during a romantic weekend in Venice.
The package contained what appeared to be a touchingly simple gift: a philosophical book about life and love, which Kravchenko — a freespirited, unkempt tycoon in the Richard Branson mould — had been writing when he was killed.
It was inscribed with his handwritten dedication to the Princess. Yet this was merely a token. The true purpose of the package was contained in the delicately phrased letter which accompanied it.
Written to Princess Michael by Kravchenko’s parents, it reminded her of one of her own favourite adages, which they had apparently gleaned from a novel she once published: ‘Never miss an opportunity to do the right thing at the right time.’
‘We think that time has come,’ they ventured.
The couple did not explain the meaning of their enigmatic entreaty. Over coffee in his hotel, situated conveniently close to Kensington Palace, Mr Nersisyan explained to me precisely what they want the Princess to do.
Though three men were convicted last month of murdering their son, he told me, Kravchenko’s parents are convinced the supposed culprits were framed to cover up a high-level plot to seize control of his £ 500 million furniture empire.
Mr Nersisyan claims to have uncovered convincing evidence to support this dark scenario, but in the corrupt cesspool that is the Russian justice system, proving it is quite another matter.
So, in despair, Kravchenko’s family are turning to Princess Michael. They hope she might use her influence — which carries considerable weight with the Russian establishment, given their enduring respect for the Royal Family and the fact her husband Prince Michael is a descendant of the once-ruling Romanov dynasty — to help bring the real killers to justice. DURING the spring of 2006, the alleged secret romance between the Princess, then 61, and her handsome ‘toy-boy oligarch’ — a widower, 20 years her junior — made international headlines. having been introduced in 2005, at a Moscow textile design conference (in the presence of Prince Michael), they remained in touch.
But their friendship was revealed with the publication in a red-top newspaper of the sensational Venice photographs, captured after they booked into adjoining rooms in the £2,200-a-night Cipriani hotel.
Seemingly enraptured, they spent four days there, taking a dreamy gondola ride, dining on the piazzas, and visiting a stylish boutique, where the Princess helped Kravchenko choose a new wardrobe. They held hands and gazed into one another’s eyes. he was even seen to kiss her face.
Afterwards they claimed to have met to discuss a possible joint business venture, and in an interview with hello! magazine that was clearly a damage limitation exercise, Princess Michael declared: ‘I hold hands with all my friends. I’m a very tactile person.’
however, her friends insisted she was ‘madly in love’ with the tycoon — who had lost his wife and seven-year-old daughter in a car crash — and they were suspected to have remained in contact after their dangerous liaison in Venice. When he was murdered, in May
Friends say she was ‘madly in love’ with the Russian
2012, she issued a brief statement saying she was ‘very distressed’.
However, I have learned that she also sent a hand-written, two-page letter to Kravchenko’s parents in which she spoke of her fondness for their son.
The letter is so deeply personal that Kravchenko’s mother, Galina, declined to reveal its full contents.
However, she showed the Mail its poignant final paragraph, which reads: ‘I can only imagine how I would feel if I had lost my own son, and so I can only imagine your sorrow and pain. Please accept my sympathy for your great loss.’ She signed it with her first names, Marie Christine.
Kravchenko was murdered as he returned to his imposing, threestorey home. It was 2am and he had been attending a furniture show, 25 miles away in central Moscow.
Since he steadfastly refused to employ bodyguards, he was an easy target. A car screeched ahead of his own, blocking the road, then two gunman pumped bullets into his body before dragging him from behind the wheel and dispatching him with a single shot to the head. Even in the treacherous gangster-state of Russia, where such events are almost routine, his death provoked widespread outrage.
Thousands of mourners gathered at his funeral, hearing his mother promise to see the killers brought to account and to continue running the massive furniture manufacturing and retail empire he had built.
It was named March 8 after Communist Russia’s international working women’s day. For, his penchant for big cigars apart, Kravchenko was a very unusual oligarch.
He had rewarded his workers with the best pay and conditions, poured millions into worthy causes, lived frugally, and would spend weeks roughing it among the poorest people in Africa and Asia, in accordance with his often- voiced scorn for materialism.
In the aftermath of the murder, all manner of theories were bandied about. It was even suggested that he might have been the victim of some highlevel plot to warn rich Russians against fraternising with the British Establishment.
It was not only his close friendship with the Princess that made this plausible.
Days before the shooting, a British newspaper had revealed that Prince Michael had been bankrolled to the tune of £320,000 by President Putin’s exiled archenemy, the London- based oligarch Boris Berezovsky (who has since died in mysterious circumstances).
None of these theories was given credence by Russian investigators, however. With disquieting haste, they formed the view this was an open-and-shut case: Kravchenko had fallen victim to a relatively trifling dispute over the purchase of a £1.3 million plot of land, in a city 120 miles south of Moscow.
The three men in the frame were duly arrested. The supposed instigator was Kravchenko’s longtime friend and fixer Alexei Pronin, 39, whose motive, according to prosecutors, was that he had screwed up the deal, losing Kravchenko’s money, and — fearing his boss was about to take vengeance — hired two hit-men to murder him.
With his alleged gangster connections, the bullet- scarred Pronin was the perfect scapegoat. To anyone who knew Kravchenko, however, the suggestion that Pronin might have feared an attack from him was ludicrous.
He despised the violence and lawlessness into which Russia has descended — hence his refusal to employ armed guards, like most other oligarchs.
The trial, which dragged on for months, was at times deeply disturbing and at others farcical.
One of the accused hit- men claimed police tortured him for two days, threatening to break his son’s teeth with a drill and rape his son with their batons; jurors were said to have been intimidated; vital evidence was mysteriously ‘lost’; and onlookers were puzzled by the lack of fight shown by the defence lawyers, even though all the defendants pleaded not guilty.
No one was surprised therefore, when, a fortnight ago, all three defendants were convicted. They are due to be sentenced on May 15 and will doubtless go to prison for a long time.
However, the Kravchenko family refuse to accept the verdict. The real murderers, they claim, are a coterie of shadowy crooks and corrupt officials who had Princess Michael’s friend killed to wrest control of his vast furniture empire, which comprises more than 100 companies.
Officially, it is too late for them to prove this. The case has been closed. But they believe a personal appeal from Princess Michael could persuade the authorities to re- open it and bring the true culprits to account.
‘We have hit dead- ends everywhere in our inquiries and we are stuck,’ Mr Nersisyan told me. ‘ We need time to get new information, and we think the Princess, with her influence, could help us find it.
‘We know she was very fond of Mikhail, and that they kept in touch after their meeting in Venice, and of course she said she was very distressed by his murder.
‘If she will agree, we would like her to sign a declaration to the Prosecutor General of Russia [the equivalent of Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions], saying she wants us to have permission to continue our investigation, based on our belief that the person who ordered Mikhail’s murder has still not been identified. We think it would be appropriate for Princess Michael to do this, taking into account that she and Mikhail used to be such close friends, and that she is a person with enormous status.
‘She would not be interfering unduly in the Russian judicial process. Such petitions are quite normal in Russia, and I’m confident, given how highly she is regarded in my country, that it would work.’
So what has happened to Russia’s biggest furniture empire? Though it is ostensibly being run by Kravchenko’s former partner, the lawyer believes it to be in the grip of high-powered criminals.
‘I can’t name them because it has to be proved legally, but I know who they are,’ he told me grimly. ‘Nowadays they control my country’s entire furniture business.
‘They are very rich and dangerous, with connections everywhere. But that won’t stop us going after them. That is our job.’
Kravchenko’s mother Galina is equally firm in her resolve. ‘We believe there are bigger people behind this murder and we want them to be found and convicted,’ she told us after a pre-sentencing hearing in Moscow. But she stressed the importance of winning Princess Michael’s support.
‘The Princess has great authority here and she is a big friend of our family. I hope she will not ignore our appeal,’ she said. ‘I pray she will help us to learn the truth one day.’
It was an impassioned plea from a heartbroken mother, but will it move Princess Michael to involve herself in a murky Moscow murder, re-kindling speculation about a chapter of her scandalplagued life she would doubtless prefer to forget?
Her spokesman declined to comment. For the moment, therefore, we must wait to see whether her memories of those romantic gondola trips will impel Princess Pushy to take up the cudgels on behalf of her departed Russian friend.
Ambushed, he was pumped full of bullets
‘These people are very rich and very dangerous’