A Russian exile who was close friends with the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been found dead in his London home, according to friends.
Nikolai Glushkov, 68, was discovered by his family and friends late on Monday night. The cause of death is not yet clear. One of his friends, the newspaper editor Damian Kudryavtsev, posted the news on his Facebook page.
Without confirming the man’s name, the Metropolitan police said the counter-terrorism command unit was leading the investigation into the death “as a precaution because of associations that the man is believed to have had”.
It said there was no evidence at present to suggest a link to the incident in Salisbury, where the Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned and remain in a critical condition.
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In the 1990s, Glushkov was a director of the state airline Aeroflot and Berezovsky’s LogoVAZ car company. In 1999, as Berezovsky fell out with Vladimir Putin and fled to the UK, Glushkov was charged with money laundering and fraud. He spent five years in jail and was freed in 2004. Fearing further arrest, he fled to the UK.
Granted political asylum, Glushkov had lived in London in recent years. In 2011, he gave evidence in the court case brought by Berezovsky against fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who remained on good terms with the Kremlin.
Glushkov told the court he had effectively been taken hostage by Putin’s administration, which wanted to pressure Berezovsky to sell his stake in the TV station ORT.
In court, Berezovsky claimed he and Abramovich had been partners in the 1990s in an oil firm, Sibneft, and accused the Chelsea football club owner of cheating him out of $5bn (£3.2bn). Abramovich denied this. The judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, rejected the claim and described Berezovsky as “deliberately dishonest”.
Glushkov was unhappy with the judgment and launched a formal appeal, citing “bias”. Meanwhile, Berezovsky disappeared from public life. In March 2013, he was found dead at his ex-wife’s home in Berkshire. Police said they believed he killed himself but his friends were not so certain, and a coroner recorded an open verdict.
Speaking to the Guardian, Glushkov said he was sceptical that Berezovsky, who was found hanged in a bathroom, had died of natural causes. “I’m definite Boris was killed. I have quite different information from what is being published in the media,” he said.
He noted that a large number of Russian exiles, including Berezovsky, and Berezovsky’s close friend Alexander Litvinenko, had died under mysterious circumstances. “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. [But] I don’t believe it was suicide,” Glushkov said.
“Too many deaths [of Russian emigres] have been happening.”
Glushkov continued to investigate the circumstances surrounding Berezovsky’s death for some months. He conceded that in the period before his friend’s death they had quarrelled. In 2013 Glushkov emailed a friend: “I have a lot of new facts that are of great interest.”