Mikhail Lesin versions of death. Mikhail Lesin and family. What was Lesin himself worried about?

He did not die as a result of an accident, as the official version says, but was killed - this is stated in the material of the BuzzFeed resource with reference to two agents and one US intelligence officer.

At the same time, the local police have already responded to these statements, saying that the investigation has no new materials to refute the official version of Lesin’s death as a result of an accident.

“We have no evidence that this was a murder. We do not have any additional evidence to report at this time,” D.C. police spokeswoman Rachel Reed was quoted as saying.

“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the sources said, adding that the weapon of death was a baseball bat and citing information from the Washington Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s report that the victim had broken ribs.

Allegedly, 57-year-old Lesin, whom the publication calls the “media czar,” was killed in Washington before a planned meeting with employees of the US Department of Justice.

“I can tell you that there is no one in the bureau who believes that this guy got drunk, fell and died on his own,” the employee admits.

The material also claims that it paid for the hotel room in which Lesin died. Representatives of the department invited the Russian tycoon to Washington so that he could tell law enforcement officials about his work at the Russian one, which he founded. But Lesin did not live to see the interview - he died the night before the planned meeting in.

The FBI is also suspicious of the very place where the media mogul died - the very average-class Dupont Circle Hotel is very different from the fashionable places where Lesin usually spent time.

The BuzzFeed article also indicates that the editors filed a lawsuit against American law enforcement agencies, in particular the Department of Justice and the FBI, demanding the release of full information on the case.

Lesin's body was found in a room at the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington on the morning of November 5, 2015, with blunt force trauma to the head, neck and torso.

After a "comprehensive investigation" that lasted nearly a year, federal prosecutors concluded in October 2016 that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls "after several days of excessive alcohol consumption." His death was ruled an "accident" and prosecutors dropped the case.

However, in mid-March 2017, the American media unexpectedly returned to this topic. Reports have emerged that the nature of the injuries on Lesin's body may be the result of an attack on him, and a spokesman for the US President said that the FBI has joined the investigation into his death.

A source in US law enforcement agencies said then that among the possible versions of Lesin’s death, the police are considering participation in a fight, a fall, and also the assumption that he could have been hit by a car. In addition, the publication published details of Lesin’s ill-fated evening.

Thus, on CCTV footage, the ex-minister seemed very drunk when he entered the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel, where he was renting a room. The bartender asked him to leave, after which Lesin took a bottle of alcohol, left the hotel and headed to the Dupont Circle Hotel. He entered his room without visible signs of injury.

In the same month, the BBC television channel released a story in which it was stated that the reason for Lesin’s death was head injuries caused by a “blunt object.” The channel cited the District of Columbia Medical Examiner's Office. According to them, before his death, the politician was struck on the neck, arms and legs. Traces of corresponding injuries were clearly visible on his body.

At the same time, criminologists did not clarify whether it is possible to say that Lesin’s death is a murder. However, Columbia police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told the Washington Post that American law enforcement officials are continuing to investigate the causes of the former minister’s death.

From 2004 to 2009, Lesin was an adviser to the President of Russia, but was dismissed from this position by President Medvedev with the harsh wording “for failure to comply with the ethics of a civil servant.” Unofficially, employees said that Lesin allegedly used the status of a presidential adviser while doing business.

Mikhail Lesin, former Minister of Press of the Russian Federation, presidential adviser and ex-head of Gazprom-Media, died in November 2015 in the USA. Death came to an influential man right in the room of the Dupont Circle budget hotel in Washington. Since no documents were found on Lesin, the identity of the deceased could not be established immediately, but only after diplomatic representatives of the Russian Federation became involved in the case.

Then there was the strange matter of the autopsy. The death of Mikhail Lesin was declared an accident, after which several sources, including the FBI, said that the Russian diplomat was killed. Moreover, he was killed using a rather sophisticated method - Lesin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, breaking his bones. According to Buzzfeed News, such a brutal reprisal was carried out demonstratively by Moscow, since Lesin was going to tell the US Department of Justice for what purpose and with what funds the Russia Today TV channel was launched, by the way, the initiator of the creation of which was Mikhail Lesin.

Money laundering

Such a version has a right to exist, since the hotel room in which Lesin’s body was found was paid for by the US Department of Justice. If the former diplomat had revealed all his cards to the Ministry of Justice, then it would have become clear to the American intelligence agencies how money was laundered with the help of the TV channel, and Mikhail Lesin would have made a deal with American justice and would have freed himself from further prosecution by the FBI. But Lesin did not live to see the employees of the Ministry of Justice, although the FBI headquarters was located a few steps from the ill-fated hotel.

Multi-million dollar assets

At the end of November 2014, Republican Senator Roger Wicker, with the help of US Attorney General Eric Holder, initiated an investigation into Mikhail Lesin. The senator suspected the Russian of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. At the same time, Wicker pointed out that Lesin owns offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, which amount to multimillions. In addition, Lesin allegedly owned companies in Europe.

Wicker noted that Mikhail Lesin owns expensive real estate in California. The total cost of the real estate was more than $28 million, and the money with which all this was purchased was withdrawn illegally by Lesin from Russia. Law firms and individuals from the Magnitsky list participated in the criminal schemes. Rossiya Bank was also mentioned, as well as its beneficiary Yuri Kovalchuk.

Strange death

The cause of death of Mikhail Lesin is still unknown. The official version of the accident is overshadowed by that of the Washington, D.C., medical examiner's office, which cited "blunt force trauma to the head" in the autopsy report. Then the document showed multiple injuries to the torso, neck, legs and arms. But US security forces did not find anything criminal in this, chalking it all up to an accident.

The Russian side also received a report from the United States describing Lesin’s injuries. In addition to the traumatic brain injury from which he died, the deceased was found to have fractured ribs, as well as a fracture of the hyoid bone, characteristic of death by strangulation. In this regard, a criminal case was opened under Art. 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm resulting in the death of the victim”).

People familiar with Lesin claim that he did not die as a result of an accident. Some sources, like opposition leader Alexei Navalny, suggest that Mikhail Lesin was placed in the witness protection program, so his death was staged by the FBI. Is this why the body of the deceased was buried so quickly in Los Angeles? In addition, 40 days after Lesin’s death, his passport showed up at the Los Angeles airport when they were crossing the border. On this fact, US Customs and Border Protection officials were unable to give any intelligible comments, although this fact was confirmed.

Later, the border guards issued their own version of what happened - they say that in order to close the non-immigrant visa of the deceased, they had to make an entry in the document in this way. The truth is that it is strange that the mark on Lesin’s passing through customs control coincided with the day of the official statement by the American authorities about the cause of Mikhail Lesin’s death. Later, these conversations subsided when the widow of the deceased, Valentina Lesina, showed her husband’s passport, saying that American law enforcement officers gave it to her immediately after his death and she had had it since then.

This version is denied by former State Duma deputy Konstantin Borovoy, who is sure that Mikhail Lesin could not live on payments from the State Department (which are due to people in the witness protection program), since he was accustomed to a luxurious life.

Family and yacht

Lesin had plenty of enemies. One of these people is considered to be the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, Alexey Venediktov. He shed light on that detail in Lesin’s biography that everyone had forgotten about. After leaving Gazprom-Media, an important event occurred in the life of 57-year-old Lesin - the father of two children and grandfather of five grandchildren fell in love. The oligarch's chosen one was fashion model Victoria Rakhimbaeva, who posed topless for the men's magazine Maxim. In addition, she graduated from the Jet Service school and worked as a flight attendant on a British private jet, where, apparently, she met Mikhail Lesin in 2014.

The lovers spent a whole year traveling, about which the girl actively published photo reports on her social media accounts. For some time they lived in Switzerland, flew around the world (in the last years of his life, Mikhail Lesin flew exclusively on business jets), went on a yacht to the most unknown islands, went fishing and spearfishing, visited the coasts of Greece, Komodo, Bali, Italy and California , where, according to Victoria, she would dream of living. Moreover, her influential patron Mikhail Lesin, whom she called “husband” in her posts, owned several luxurious mansions there.

In September 2015, Victoria gave birth to a daughter for Mikhail Lesin; according to relatives, he was inspired and happy. After the birth of his daughter, Mikhail Lesin gave up bad habits, giving up, in particular, alcohol. A divorce was coming from his wife Valentina, and divorce, Alexey Venediktov emphasized, is always a matter of property. Mikhail Lesin had a lot of it, and judging by the luxurious honeymoon, the lovers clearly did not intend to create a new family from heaven in the hut. The last love of a retired official inevitably entailed serious property damage for his former family.

However, Lesin died and this did not happen. Victoria Rakhimbaeva, who became a media character in the last year of his life, before deleting her accounts from social networks and going into the shadows forever, reacted to his death on Facebook with a post of initially incomprehensible content - “Serenity - peace and serenity. You found them."

A month later, Serenity herself was found. It turned out to be a 55-meter beautiful yacht produced by the Dutch shipyard Heesen, worth about $50 million, which was waiting to be picked up from preventative repairs at the docks of Brisbane, Australia.

Many people guessed that the head of Gazprom-Media had his own yacht (one of his few friends, Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, in particular, mentioned vacationing on it), but until that moment no one officially knew. When issues with the right of inheritance were settled, the yacht was surprisingly quickly sold at the Palm Beach International Boat Show to an unknown buyer. It is also unknown who received the money for it and what the exact amount of the transaction was, but initially yacht broker IYC put it up for sale for only €37 million.

And Victoria Rakhimbaeva, according to the source, changed her field of activity, graduating from a prestigious school of interior design, lives quietly in Moscow, raising Mikhail Lesin’s two-year-old daughter Tamara, and does not need much financially if she can afford a nanny for the child. It is known that she still has a passion for sea travel, although now the private yacht has been replaced by a cruise liner.

Lesin's legacy

Mikhail Lesin has linked his future with the United States since 2009, when he was fired by Dmitry Medvedev from the post of presidential adviser with the wording “failure to comply with the rules of the civil service and the ethics of civil servant behavior.” Lesin almost openly patronized the Video International company he created a long time ago, which led to its monopolization of the Russian media advertising market. After his dismissal, Lesin moved his entire family to the United States and bought his first American property.

Estimates of the size of Mikhail Lesin's fortune vary. Having officially worked as an official all his life, Lesin, for obvious reasons, was not included in the Forbes lists. However, political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky, who knew him since the 1990s, says that even when Lesin organized Boris Yeltsin’s presidential campaign and headed the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, he was already a multimillionaire. A number of sources believe that Mikhail Lesin, by virtue of his official powers, had at hand a lot of ways to withdraw VGTRK money abroad without the risk of being discovered by tax and law enforcement authorities.

FBK also believes that Lesin mastered schemes for transferring financial flows abroad through offshore companies back in those years, and a significant share of them were the huge profits of Video International, almost uncontrolled by the state, of which, according to documents, Lesin was never a co-owner.

Journalist Evgenia Albats confidently estimates the amount of capital of Lesin’s gray business empire at $1 billion. Politician Konstantin Borovoy and a number of other sources believe that a significant part of Lesin’s assets was obtained from the funds of the Russia Today channel he launched, since hundreds of millions of dollars were allocated for its creation “It’s not even possible to count.”

The Lesin mansions in California, accidentally discovered by Senator Wicker (which only came to light because the Lesin family was sued, demanding millions in compensation, by the housekeeper and nanny from two different estates) were just the tip of the iceberg. According to some reports, Lesin’s inheritance consists of multimillion-dollar assets registered in shell companies in Finland, and possibly in Switzerland, where his son Anton lived and studied from the age of 10.

Today, 34-year-old Anton Lesin (in the Swiss style Antone Lessine) is a well-known producer, who has several films under his belt starring A-list stars. After graduating from a prestigious college in Switzerland, Anton Lesin joined his family in the USA. It was then that his father began to take steps to legalize his shadow capital in the new realities.

Not every graduate of the New York Academy of Film Arts can boast that his first works starred Brad Pitt and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anton Lesin was lucky - these were the stars who appeared in the films that he released as an executive producer.

Anton Lesin did not inherit his father's entrepreneurial talents, succeeding only in aristocratic pastimes like playing polo, which his Swiss wife Carol also does professionally. But a special cinematic education and good knowledge of languages ​​helped him place his family money in the American film industry.

In 2012, Anton Lesin and his father’s longtime friend, Hollywood manager with Russian roots Alexander Shapiro (Sasha Shapiro), acquired a controlling stake in the film production and distribution company QED International through their Media Content Capital fund.

Having worked for almost 20 years at Warner Brothers and risen to the post of vice president, Shapiro understood that QED had not been doing very well in financing new films lately. So much so that the production of Elysium, starring Matt Damon, was somewhat stalled and the company was in dire need of outside investors. Media Content Capital offered her $25 million for 75%. The deal was concluded, and a year later its founder, Bill Block, was forced out of the company, after which operational management was completely transferred to Shapiro and Lesin.

There was no shortage of investment, and starting with the low-budget horror film Lair of the Beast, QED, under the leadership of Shapiro and Lesin, in the following years released Sabotage with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the famous tank drama about the Second World War, Fury with Brad Pitt . He also became a co-producer of this film.

For the time being, Lesin and Shapiro remained silent about the origin of capital for film production, until a letter from Senator Wicker was published in 2014. When it came to the corruption of millions of Media Content Capital, Anton Lesin, in a commentary to The Hollywood Reporter, said that a possible FBI investigation against his father would not affect the company. The funds do not come from Russia, but from Europe, he emphasized, thus hinting at his “second homeland” Switzerland.

Hollywood wash

At the same time, the Hollywood “washing” of the Lesin family continued to expand. In mid-2015, Media Content Capital launched Covert Media, whose activities included distribution in addition to film production, thus becoming a full-cycle film producer. Its former top manager, Paul Hanson, was put in charge of the QED subsidiary. The company’s tasks, according to its official website, include “the creation and distribution of 3-4 films per year.”

Meanwhile, according to Peter Newman, head of the New York University School of the Arts, Hollywood's appetite for so-called Dumb Money - financing film productions from investors new to the film industry - has intensified in recent years due to the difficult economic climate. Financial flows passing through a string of intermediary companies are sometimes very difficult to track.

According to a source familiar with the mechanisms of the American film industry, even a superficial analysis of QED International’s activities suggests that the company brings virtually no profit to its founders. According to the IMDB website, the most commercially successful QED film was “Fury” with Brad Pitt, bringing the creators $18 million in profit with a budget of $68 million. And this is taking into account the fact that 40–50% of the profit goes to film distribution companies, and half of the remaining was received by co-produced by Pitt himself. The rest of the films released by the company became classic examples of box office failures, including “Sabotage” with Schwarzenegger.

Luxury real estate company

In addition to cinema, Mikhail Lesin’s money circulation also occurs in the field of luxury real estate. Anton Lesin is the owner of Dastel Holdings, a California-based company created to acquire and manage luxury real estate. He also controls the company Java Drive Inc, whose activities also include real estate. Dastel, in particular, designed the Lesin mansions in Beverly Park, next to the houses of basketball player Magic Johnson and actor Samuel Jackson, and a house in another prestigious area of ​​Brentwood with an area of ​​about 980 sq.m., purchased for $9 million.

It has 7 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, a wine cellar, large storage rooms, a sauna with steam room, an elevator, a huge dining room, an underground garage and much more. It is noteworthy that both mansions are currently up for sale at prices much higher than they were purchased for - one for $23 million, the other for $28 million.

However, the seemingly emerging trend of getting rid of the Lesin family from expensive assets is being destroyed by their recent acquisitions. In May, Anton Lesin purchased a luxurious mansion in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades for $16 million, which became the Lesins' second property in this location - the first mansion, a simpler one, was purchased by them for $4 million. And this suggests that the family The Lesins' bins are still far from exhausted.

Mikhail Lesin.

The statement by American forensic experts that the death of former Russian Press Minister Mikhail Lesin was not due to a heart attack, as previously stated, but due to a blow to the head with a blunt object, raises a lot of questions. And the first of them: why did this become known only 4.5 months after death?

Fight outside the Dupont Circle Hotel?

Two sources who were familiar with the former head of Gazprom Media told the Dozhd TV channel that the minister could have become a victim of a domestic crime.

As a Dozhd source said, who communicated with Lesin shortly before his death, in the fall of 2015, Mikhail Yuryevich flew to Washington to visit one of his acquaintances. He stayed at a hotel in one of the fashionable areas of Washington. At night, Lesin left the company of friends and went to the city for a walk. He ended up in the area of ​​the Dupont Circle Hotel. It was there, according to Dozhd’s interlocutor, that a fight could have occurred, as a result of which Lesin was injured. He then went up to the Dupont Circle room, where a maid later found him dead.

The source said that Lesin had recently had health problems. He underwent 14 operations in Switzerland to replace vertebrae with titanium implants. Lesin was taking painkillers, so he was weak.

Another Dozhd interlocutor, who also knew Lesin closely, admitted that he drank alcohol that night. He agreed with the version of the fight, recalling that Lesin was a former boxer, and in his youth he often got involved in conflicts.

“It’s in his nature to be persistent,” the source said.

A forensic medical examination established that the cause of Lesin’s death was blunt force injuries to the head, as well as injuries to the neck, torso, upper and lower extremities.
Earlier, a New York Times source reported that Lesin could have been injured during the argument.

Was the person buried?

The statement by American forensic experts greatly added fog to an already mysterious story.

“Lesin was buried on November 13 in Los Angeles, only members of his first family and very close friends were at the funeral,” writes the famous Russian journalist Olga Romanova in the online magazine “Spectrum.” - Victoria Rakhimbaeva, a former model, mother of Mikhail Lesin’s third child, who was born on September 25, 2015, was not allowed to attend the funeral. There are no photos from this funeral, and all the friends of the deceased with whom we managed to talk claim that the coffin with the body of the deceased was open.

It is not very clear why it was necessary for almost five months to insist on the version that the cause of death was a heart attack. Was this an agreement with representatives of the US authorities? Or the family was not told anything, and the family did not notice anything? Or was everyone satisfied with the version of a heart attack at first?

It is known that Mikhail Lesin was very concerned about his health. However, periods of a healthy lifestyle interspersed with periods that his ill-wishers called “binges.” The former minister was prone to disappearing, turning off the phone - this, by the way, became one of the reasons for his scandalous dismissal by Dmitry Medvedev from advisers with the wording that amazed everyone at the time: for “systematic disciplinary violations,” including “non-compliance with the rules of the civil service and the ethics of behavior of civil servants.”

A source who was close to Lesin and who asked not to be named for obvious reasons says that Mikhail Lesin had a habit of “running away from people” by turning off their phones, and such a disappearance could last for weeks. He could go for a run in a tracksuit in the morning, then end up on a train, throw his phone out of the window, and then show up at his friends’ dacha. They say that Alexey Miller, the head of Gazprom, was terribly angry because of one such story. And that very similar events began to develop six days before the lifeless body of the former press minister was found by American police in the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington.

However, many then did not believe that Mikhail Lesin really died.

First, The Daily Mail wrote about it - Lesin’s death was staged. “According to this version, he is being held in a safe place under the witness protection program, telling the FBI everything he knows about Putin’s Russia,” said Will Stewart, the author of the article published in the British publication.

American media noted that in 2014, Republican Senator from Mississippi Robin Wicker called for an investigation against Lesin on suspicion of money laundering and corruption. The senator claimed that over the years of work in the government, the ex-minister acquired property worth many millions of dollars in Europe and the United States, including real estate in Los Angeles worth $28 million. In the fall of the same year, American authorities began an investigation into Lesin’s real estate in California.

In general, it appeared that Lesin was placed under the FBI's witness protection program in exchange for the safety and preservation of family property. This version was also supported by the fact that after the announcement of the death of the former minister, all matters died down, but the Americans at the State Department level started talking about the fact that Vladimir Putin was involved in corruption, and they started talking somehow very confidently.

And the funeral here, of course, is not an alibi.”

Suspicious neighborhood

However, against the version with a witness protection program, according to Romanova, is the very unfavorable financial situation of Victoria Rakhimbaeva, to whom, as they say, Mikhail Yuryevich was very attached.

“Immediately after the first statement from the Washington medical examiner’s office - when the experts said that the cause of death had not been established - co-owner of the Russian Germany publishing house Boris Feldman wrote on his Facebook that Lesin “if he died, it was not by his own death,” and the release of information about the progress of the investigation is under the control of someone who has significant influence in the District of Columbia, the results of the investigation, which is not yet completed, will no longer be available to the public, the journalist reminds. - “Those who want to know what happened to the former Minister of Press of the Russian Federation, the former head of the largest media structure in the Russian Federation, Gazprommedia, a former media adviser, mentor of the Kovalchuk clan, who unexpectedly found himself in a cheap Washington hotel room next to the FBI office, will have to contact to local courts. Those in the know no longer need to speculate,” he wrote.

However, the Dupont Circle Hotel is not exactly next door to the FBI office. That is, the FBI is close, but the Russian station building is even closer.

Until recently, the version that Lesin was killed had no confirmation at all. It says that Mikhail Lesin was killed in a Washington hotel by Russian agents - just so that he could not go under the FBI witness protection program and tell nasty things about our best people. Supporters of this version point to the building of the Russian station, which, indeed, is located about a hundred meters from the hotel where the body of Mikhail Lesin was found. And now, after reports of blunt trauma to the head, neck, torso, arms and legs, this version will clearly become the most common.

Fell from the ladder? There was no stairs in the room. Slipped and hit the battery? Arms, legs, neck, torso and head - that doesn’t happen. Was he beaten on the street, got to his room and died? No, they would have seen it at the entrance. Beaten in the room? But you can’t do this silently. They beat you up somewhere else and brought you to your room to die by bribing the receptionist? Strange behavior of killers. The residents didn’t start spending money on potassium cyanide, polonium, or whatever they were using, and decided to silently beat them with a blunt object? You can’t say anything original.”

Hotel where gays gather

At the same time, lawyer Alexey Binetsky, who defended Viktor Bout and was well acquainted with the peculiarities of the American law enforcement system, told Gazeta.Ru that he did not see politics or conspiracy theories in the fact that the causes of Lesin’s death were reported to the media only four months after his death . “The cause of death, as you understand, was known either immediately, or almost immediately. Now it has been announced to the general public. This is due to the work of experts. The examination that was carried out cannot always immediately answer all the questions if it is approached professionally. Our justice is based on time factors - one thing must be done in 10 days, another in 20 days. This is not the case in Western countries. If a high-quality examination requires a year, then they will spend a year and will not say anything until its completion, since there is a secret of the investigation,” Binetsky said.

He also added that if America wanted to use the fact of Lesin's death for propaganda purposes, it would have done so. “He was found in a specific place: the Dupont Circle Hotel, where gays gather. And in Russia, as you know, they are fighting against the propaganda of homosexuality. Lesin was previously an adviser to Yeltsin and the creator of a number of propaganda television programs. In a word, if the United States wanted to use all this for propaganda, they could have turned this story any way they wanted. But this did not happen,” he noted.
According to the lawyer, American law enforcement agencies have no reason to hide the circumstances of Lesin’s death. “This was not the “smallest” or the poorest person, his death inevitably causes a public outcry. In most countries of the world, including the United States, they understand this, and therefore they take the investigation of such incidents seriously,” Binetsky concluded.

Served under both Yeltsin and Putin

Mikhail Lesin, ex-Minister of Press of Russia and former head of the Gazprom-Media holding, was born in 1958 into the family of a military builder. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering (MISI) named after Kuibyshev, he worked in various positions in the USSR Ministry of Industry and Construction, and in 1988 he became deputy director for the production of television programs of the creative production association “Game - Technology”. In 1990, Lesin headed the youth creative production association RTV (Radio and Television), which in 1991 was transformed into the advertising agency Video International (now Vi). In 1996-1997, Lesin was the head of the Russian Presidential Public Relations Department. He was considered the author of the slogan “Vote with your heart,” the commercials “I Believe, I Love, I Hope,” “Save and Preserve,” and the weekly radio addresses of President Boris Yeltsin as part of the presidential campaign in 1996. Then he served as first deputy chairman of the All-Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK). In 1999, Mikhail Lesin was appointed Minister of Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting and Media. With his direct participation, the assets of Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most were transferred to Gazprom.

From 2004 to 2009, Lesin was an adviser to the President of the Russian Federation, but was dismissed from this position by President Medvedev with the harsh wording “for failure to comply with the ethics of a civil servant.” Unofficially, employees of the presidential administration said that Lesin allegedly used the status of a presidential adviser while doing business. However, Lesin did not hide the fact that he advised, for example, Yuri Kovalchuk on the creation of the National Media Group (NMG). “Yes, I advised the leaders of NMG. What's strange about this? “I am one of the famous media specialists,” Lesin said in an interview with Forbes. In recent years, Lesin spent a lot of time in the USA, where his family lived. At the same time, as Lesin himself assured, real estate and property overseas were purchased with the money of adult children. “This is definitely not my property, the children arranged their lives themselves, took out loans for these transactions, they exist in the bank,” he explained to Forbes.

This is not the first oligarch from Russia to die abroad under strange circumstances.

Forensic experts in the United States came to the conclusion that the cause of death of former Russian Press Minister Mikhail Lesin was head injuries, communications director of the Washington Medical Examiner's Office Lashon Beamon told RIA Novosti. According to her, Lesin also suffered blunt injuries to the neck, torso, upper and lower extremities.

As you know, Lesin died on November 5, 2015 at a hotel in central Washington. According to a summary of the incident, his body was found lying on the floor of the hotel room by a police officer. Paramedics called to the scene pronounced him dead and the body was sent for autopsy. Regarding the possible causes of death, the police report only specified that there were no gunshot wounds.

After Berezovsky, who “hanged himself” in London, this is the second unexpected and very strange death of an oligarch from Russia abroad. Second, because although Lesin was not officially listed among the super-rich Russians, according to a number of publications in the media and legal claims brought against him in Russia and the United States, he was, without a doubt, a very wealthy person.

The future minister and creator of the largest television advertising company Video International was born in Moscow, as Wikipedia notes, “in a Soviet Jewish family.” The father is a military builder, he worked in Mongolia, and therefore the family lived happily ever after in the USSR. However, at school, the young son of a foreign worker studied very poorly, but he was distinguished by fights in the yard, which was remembered for life in the form of a broken nose.

In those turbulent years, young Misha, as his biographers testify, responded to the nickname “Boatswain” and was registered with the district juvenile affairs inspectorate.

As a result, when Mikhail Lesin tried to enter the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering (MISI), he failed miserably and ended up in the army. Having served his due service, he was able to enter the same MISI only under the quota for demobilization. After graduating from university, thanks to his father’s connections, he managed to work in Ulaanbaatar. Then perestroika broke out, relaxations began, and the KVN game, in which Lesin participated with the MISI team, gained enormous popularity. Thanks to this, he made useful connections on television. From 1988-1990 he is already deputy director for television program production at the Creative Production Association “Igrotekhnika”, and became director of the Youth Creative Production Association “RTV”. "Igrotekhnika" was engaged in preparing and conducting KVN programs on a commercial basis (searching for sponsors and advertisers). A little later, “Igrotekhnika” was transformed into the “Intellex” enterprise under the Timiryazevsky district committee of the Komsomol.

The media later wrote that before this Lesin was also involved in a number of dubious and even scandalous stories. At the end of 1987, the future minister of press allegedly opened an underground studio for duplicating Western video porn. One of his business partners in this field was a certain Alexander Kashin, a dropout student at the journalism department of Krasnoyarsk University. Their “business” was as follows: in the basement of a house located in the Arbat alleys, Lesin installed four video recorders that he purchased in “Beryozka” with checks earned in fraternal Mongolia. Several accomplices took turns copying contraband videotapes. Kashin once a week picked up the “goods”, which he then distributed among small dealers who “worked” in the underground passage on Pushkinskaya Square. A year later, Lesin and Kashin established a constant supply of homemade cassettes to a number of commercial stalls opened in the center of Moscow. Then, as they said, one of Lesin and Kashin’s competitors “told” them to the KGB. Lesin himself, as evil tongues claimed, in order to avoid criminal punishment, could not refuse the offer that the KGB officers made to him. By the way, the former head of the Presidential Security Service, Alexander Korzhakov, once mentioned Lesin’s cooperation with the authorities - in a private conversation dedicated to undercover activities among television management.

In 1991, Lesin sharply went up the hill - he headed the advertising agency Video International. Then he is the general director of the television company “TV Novosti” RIA Novosti. In August 1997, Lesin became deputy director of VGTRK.

All advertising of VGTRK took place through Video International and its subsidiaries. Lesin's official position as deputy director of VGTRK, directly responsible for the financial flows of this company, provided him with the opportunity to legalize funds hidden abroad.

Soon, the former seller of homemade cassette tapes actively entered politics - he became the head of President Yeltsin’s public relations department. He was considered the author of the slogan “Vote with your heart”, the commercials “I Believe, I Love, I Hope”, “Save and Preserve” and the weekly radio addresses of President Boris Yeltsin as part of the scandalous presidential campaign of 1996. At the same time, Lesin conducted a “sensational” interview with Yeltsin, in which the president first announced from the screen about the upcoming heart surgery. By the way, Lesin even tried to make money on this by offering a number of Western television companies to buy a recording of this conversation at a reasonable price: $270 per minute, or wholesale for $1,100. And again there was a scandal - this time international. For the first time in their lives, Western journalists were faced with an inexplicable fact: a high-ranking government official was selling video footage like a novice stringer.

In 1999-2004, Lesin served as Minister of Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting and Mass Communications. As Minister of Press, Mikhail Lesin participated in the transfer of the assets of Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most to the control of Gazprom and the “defeat of the old NTV.”

In particular, it was he who endorsed Protocol No. 6 (the agreement on the sale of Media-Most CJSC to Gazprom for $773 million), in exchange for which the former owner was guaranteed the termination of the criminal case. When Medvedev was president, he became his adviser, but in November 2009, by his own decree, he was suddenly relieved of his post. The Interfax agency, citing a source in the Russian presidential administration, then reported that Lesin was expelled for “systematic disciplinary violations” and “non-compliance with the rules of the civil service and the ethics of civil servant behavior.” According to analysts, the reason was Lesin’s “excessive activity” in business. However, having lost his government position, he continued to remain an influential player in the media sphere. In 2013-15 was the Chairman of the Board (General Director) of OJSC Gazprom-Media Holding.

Lesin's career and life ended, as stated, on November 6, 2015, when he was found dead in a room at the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington. At first it was reported that death was due to a heart attack. The corpse was hastily cremated and buried in Los Angeles.

But on March 10, 2016, a sensation broke out: forensic medical authorities and the US police released information according to which the cause of Lesin’s death was not a heart attack, but injuries to the head, neck, torso, arms and legs. In other words, it was suspected that he had been murdered. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov expressed the desire of the Russian authorities to receive a detailed report from US investigative authorities on the circumstances and causes of Lesin’s death.

A second scandal immediately broke out. The well-known “whistleblower” Navalny announced that, according to the website of the American border service, Lesin, who died in the United States, allegedly left the country 40 days after his death. However, this sensation quickly burst. It turned out that this was a common practice in the United States - thus, the American visa issued to him was closed on the website, and Lesina’s widow reported that her late husband’s passport was in her possession and no one could use it.

Meanwhile, Lesin’s longtime friend Sergei Vasiliev, familiar with the details of the last days of the ex-minister’s life, explained that Lesin flew to Washington at the invitation of the chairman of the board of directors of the Alfa-Bank group, Pyotr Aven, but did not have time to get to the banker. According to Vasiliev, in Washington, Lesin, who met with old friends, had a breakdown “related to alcohol.” After which, an intoxicated Lesin checked into “the first hotel he came across.” In the Dupont Circle room, the former minister was discovered a day later in the evening by a hotel security officer sleeping on the floor in a drunken state, and the next morning by a maid - no longer showing signs of life. According to the explanation of Vasiliev, who called for waiting for the results of the official investigation, during such “failures” that had occurred before, Lesin, having serious health problems and being drunk, often lost coordination, fell and received serious injuries.

All these strange stories forced the media to once again actively discuss the causes of Mikhail Lesin’s death. They began to shake up his biography again and a lot of interesting things were discovered.

In particular, it turned out that at the end of July 2014, Senator from Mississippi Roger Wicker demanded that the US Attorney General's Office check on what grounds Mikhail Lesin bought real estate in Los Angeles worth $28 million in 2009. The appeal mentions the Money Laundering Control Act, which provides for millions of fines and confiscation of property as sanctions in the case of the use of illegal proceeds. Lesin himself stated that this was not his property: “the children arranged their lives themselves, took out loans for these transactions, they exist in the bank.”

They remembered that the media wrote about his close contacts with the leaders of the criminal world. Thus, while hosting the show “Mrs. America-Mrs. Soviet Union,” Lesin was seen at one of these competitions in the company of mafia bosses Otari Kvantrishvili and Mishka-Yaponchik. In 1993, Lesin organized the Miss Russia beauty contest. One of the sponsors of this competition was the “famous businessman” Sergei Mikhailov, better known to prosecutors as “Mikhas”. Mikhailov and Lesin then went, as the media wrote, with the winner to reap the fruits of her fame on the beaches of Miami Beach.

During financial audits by government agencies, Video International was constantly fined for serious violations of tax laws. The loudest of the scandals was the story associated with the Moscow City Bank. The manager of the bank, Dolgov, fled abroad, and the management of VI complained that Mosgorbank had defrauded them of two and a half million dollars. This considerable amount was transferred to bank accounts in 1995 by the American company Projects International, registered in the state of Delaware. During the investigation, it turned out that Lesin and his partner kept much more in Mosgorbank - about 10 million dollars received for advertising (the fate of this money, by the way, remained unknown).

A criminal case was opened against Lesin. But after a couple of months, the parties came to an agreement, the case was dropped, and all participants in this banking scam significantly increased their capital.

In 2005, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy Alexander Kravets sent a request to President Vladimir Putin in which he accused Lesin of a number of crimes: from money laundering through a Lithuanian bank and connections with criminal gangs to owning 10 cars at the same time, including a jeep. Toyota”, which did not undergo customs clearance. Moreover, Kravets argued that Lesin, being a high-ranking federal official, still controlled the advertising holding Video International, since he had a package of bills of exchange for the company, allowing him to introduce external management at any time.

Whether this was true or not, it turns out that Lesin and his family were very rich people, although he was not officially listed as an oligarch. However, what else can you call someone who buys a house over the hill for 28 million? And here an analogy with the late Berezovsky immediately involuntarily suggests itself. After all, he, too, was one of the most active politicians in Russia, he also tried to put the Russian media under his control, he was also closely connected with the previous establishment in the Kremlin, and therefore, in the same way, later fell out of favor and lost the levers of power.

Like Berezovsky, Lesin, in fact, moved abroad, bought himself a luxurious house there, and then suddenly died under strange circumstances. Or, like Berezovsky, was he killed there?

But then by whom and why? There are no answers to these questions yet. Or maybe they will never exist. Although the stormy biographies of these two characters in modern Russian history, who quickly rose from the bottom of the muddy foam of the 90s, speak for themselves...

Special for the Centenary