Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov has been found dead in an Indian hotel two days after a friend died on the same trip.
They were visiting the eastern state of Odisha and the millionaire, a local politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel.
Antov was a well-known figure in the town of Vladimir, east of Moscow.
Last summer he denied criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account.
The millionaire’s death is the latest in a string of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticized the war.
Russian media reports said Mr Antov, 65, fell from the Rayagada town hall window on Sunday. Another member of his four-person Russian group, Vladimir Budanov, died at the hotel on Friday.
Odisha Police Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma said Mr Budanov suffered a stroke as his friend “was depressed after his death and he too died”. The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that the police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”.
Tour guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Mr Budanov may have “consumed a lot of alcohol because he had bottles of alcohol”.
Pavel Antov founded meat processing plant Vladimir Standard and in 2019 Forbes estimated his fortune at some $140m (£118m) topping Russia’s wealthy list of lawmakers and civil servants.
He played an important role in the Legislative Assembly of Vladimir, leading a committee on agrarian policy and ecology. Assembly Deputy Speaker Vyacheslav Kartukhin said he died in “tragic circumstances”.
At the end of June, he appeared to be reacting to a Russian missile attack on a residential building in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv, which left one dead and injured his seven-year-old daughter and her mother.
A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account describes how the family was pulled from the rubble: “It is extremely difficult to call this all anything other than terror.”
The message was deleted and Antov later posted on social media that he was a supporter of the president, a “patriot of my country” and that he supported the war.
The WhatsApp message had come from someone with whom he strongly disagreed with opinion on “the special military operation in Ukraine”, he insisted. It was accidentally posted on his messenger and was a very annoying misunderstanding, he said.
Several high profile Russian tycoons have died in mysterious circumstances since the war began.
In September, the head of Russian oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, reportedly fell from a hospital window in Moscow.
