Ravil Maganov, chairman of the Lukoil board of directors, died Thursday after falling from a Moscow hospital window. The also vice president of the second Russian oil company is the latest in a series of top executives of Russian energy companies who have died this year in an unusual way.
The 67-year-old oil businessman was being treated at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, in a unit located on the sixth floor. According to Russian media reports, he suffered from a serious heart condition. In a statement offering condolences to his family, Lukoil said Maganov had "passed away after a serious illness." Several media attributed the event to a suicide.
The Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, outside Moscow, is known for having had members of the political and business elite as patients. The last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, died there on Tuesday.
Several directors related to the Russian energy industry have died this year in circumstances not fully clarified.
In January, Gazprom Invest transport chief Leonid Shulman woke up dead at his dacha near St. Petersburg. There was a suicide note.
In February, a day after Russia sent its troops to Ukraine, Alexander Tyulyakov, a Gazprom executive, was found dead in his garage near St. Petersburg.
Sergei Protosenya, a former executive at Novatek, the leading independent natural gas producer, died with his wife and daughter at their home in Lloret de Mar in April. The Mossos d'Esquadra report indicated that Protosenya, 55, would have killed his wife and his teenage daughter, 18, apparently while they were sleeping, before taking his own life by hanging from a garden railing. But the son of the family, who was on vacation in France, ruled out this possibility.
A day before the death of the Protosenya, a former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Aváyev, died at his home in the Russian capital, also in the company of his wife and 13-year-old daughter. Another daughter, Anastasia, 26, was the one who found the bodies. Aváyev had a gun in his hand and the preliminary evidence pointed to him as being responsible for the events. The flat was locked from the inside.
In May, Alexander Subbotin, who had worked for Lukoil, died in the basement of a shaman's house in Mytischi, near Moscow, of a heart attack apparently caused by drinking toad poison.
Born in 1954 in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, in the 1980s Ravil Maganov worked at Langepasneftegaz, a company that later became part of Lukoil, an oil company created in 1991. Maganov is credited with originating the company's name , “Lukoil”.
Since 1993 he has been part of the board of directors, and has chaired it since 2020.
Shortly after the Russian troops entered Ukraine, the Lukoil management called for a resolution of the conflict as soon as possible and expressed sympathy for the victims of “this tragedy”. The founder of the oil company, the oligarch Vaguit Alekpérov, resigned in April after the United Kingdom imposed sanctions against him for the Russian military campaign in Ukraine.
