There is a lot of confusion after the accident of the Embraer that was officially listed as the property of the Russian company MNT Aero, one of Yevgueni Prigozhin's different Russian companies.
It is suspected that it could have been shot down by a missile in mid-flight, although there is also speculation about the possibility of a mechanical failure, something plausible, although increasingly improbable according to the first analyzes that are being carried out on the available images. In these appears the private plane, in which Prigozhin would travel, plummeting on uninhabited land in Tver, Russia.
The plane was a Legacy 600, an executive version of the Embraer 135, a regional jet built in Brazil by Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica S.A.. In a commercial airline version, the 135 model can carry up to 40 passengers and was an aircraft with some commercial success in United States, as it is the ideal device to power the hubs of large carriers from regional airports to connect with other flights.
In the executive version, the same cabin was adapted to carry a maximum of 13 passengers with all the comforts and this series of aircraft was named Legacy. This version that was well accepted as a business aircraft or even as a state VIP aircraft, since Embraer has sold almost 300 units of this variant.
The plane that crashed in Tver had the Russian registration RA-02795 since the end of 2019, something rare, since most Russian owners of private planes kept the records of other countries on their aircraft in order to avoid high import taxes. Russian commercial airlines also had the majority of aircraft not built in Russia with license plates as exotic as, for example, the Bermuda Islands or Cayman, as required by aircraft rental companies in order to have legal certainty with their contracts. Since the invasion of Ukraine and the long war that followed, Russia unilaterally decided to re-register Boeing and Airbus aircraft in its national registry to the astonishment of their real owners, who now find it increasingly difficult to recover the aircraft until the armed conflict with Ukraine ends. .
The Embraer Legacy in which Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, a former sausage seller in Leningrad who became a close associate of President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, would have died, was not his only private plane.
Another twin Embraer Legacy, this one registered as RA-02748, was also in the name of one of its different companies, as is the case with two more aircraft: a British Aerospace 125 registered as RA-02731 and a Hawker 800 with registration M-VITO . This is registered in the Isle of Man, a tax haven and British dependency, on behalf of one of its shell companies, Beratex, in turn related to a financial services company in the Seychelles, data that transcends as members of the Treasury Department of the United States have been unraveling a whole bunch of companies when it has had to apply sanctions to Russian businessmen.
To the previous aircraft, used as personal transport for Prigozhin and his collaborators, we must add a small four-seater Robinson R44 helicopter that this Russian businessman would have as transport to fly from the heliport of his residence to the Saint Petersburg airport or other places. nearby, as well as a 37.4 meter long yacht, the St Vitamin. It is a remarkable pleasure boat, although it is far from the spectacular megayachts of more than 100 meters of other Russian millionaires.
The singularity is that the St Vitamin was built in 2005 by a Spanish shipyard, Astondoa, a hundred-year-old company born in Vizcaya that has been based in the port of Santa Pola since the 1970s. The boat has an Italian design from the Nuvolari house and its interior is by Versace. Having not touched European ports in recent times, the Vitamin has not been one of those affected by the embargoes that different European countries have applied on the assets of Russian citizens abroad. These millionaires were included in the sanctions of the European Union since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, in which Prigozhin actively participated leading his paramilitary organization: the Wagner Group.
The one on Wednesday in Russia was the first fatal accident of this model. In its executive version, the Embraer 135 Legacy only had one accident: it was in September 2006 on a delivery flight from the São José dos Campos factory to the United States with intermediate stops, the recently launched business jet collided with a Boeing 737 in full flight over the Amazon jungle in the state of Mato Grosso.
The Boeing was on a regular flight between Manaus and Rio de Janeiro with 148 passengers and six crew members. The planes of both aircraft hit mid-flight and while the Embraer was able to make an emergency landing at an air base, the 737 lost control and crashed. All seven occupants of the Legacy survived, although all 154 of the commercial plane died when it went down.
That was, until yesterday, the only accident in which a Legacy was involved, not the 135 version, the commercial passenger one, which in the last two decades has had some twenty accidents and incidents, although no victims among its passengers or crew. The only one that happened in Spain dates back to 2006 in Madrid-Barajas, when a Thai Boeing 747 that was circulating on an auxiliary runway to take off for Rome and then Bangkok, deviated from its taxiing line and its plane impacted against the rudder of a French Embraer 135 parked and only occupied by three crew members waiting for their passengers to fly to France. No one was injured on that occasion.
