A wealthy Russian businessman and lawmaker was found dead after apparently falling from a hotel terrace in India, shortly after another Russian national he was traveling with died at the same hotel, the Indian police said on Wednesday.
The two men — Pavel Antov, the founder of the Russian meat conglomerate Vladimir Standard; and Vladimir Budanov, his traveling companion — were part of a tourist group visiting the Rayagada district in the Indian state of Odisha, an area known for its temples.
Mr. Antov, who the Russian news media said had criticized Russian shelling of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, is the latest Russian magnate to die under mysterious circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Mr. Budanov, 61, died of cardiac arrest at the hotel there last week, and Mr. Antov, who had just turned 65, fell from the hotel’s terrace and died over the weekend, said Rasmi Ranjani Pradhan, an inspector with the Odisha police. Hotel workers and the hospital authorities alerted the police to the deaths.
“Whether Mr. Antov’s death is a suicide is a matter of investigation,” Mr. Pradhan said. “The medical report has termed it as accidental.”
Local news outlets, citing the police, reported that Mr. Antov had been found lying in a pool of blood outside the hotel.
Mr. Antov topped the Forbes list of Russia’s richest civil servants in 2019 with a reported fortune of nearly 10 billion rubles, or over $140 million at Tuesday’s exchange rate. He was also a member of Parliament in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.
The vice speaker of the regional Parliament, Vyacheslav Kartukhin, said that Mr. Antov’s death was the result of tragic circumstances, the Russian state new agency TASS reported. The Parliament’s speaker, Vladimir Kiselyov, described Mr. Antov as a man who had won everyone over.
The Odisha police said on Tuesday that the inquiry into the deaths of two Russians would be handled by the Crime Investigation Department, a specialized branch of the police.
The Russian news media reported in June that Mr. Antov had criticized the shelling of residential areas in Kyiv as terrorism, though he later appeared to recant his statement.
A post under his name on the Russian social media platform VKontakte said that the original message had been shared in error and emphasized that Mr. Antov was a patriot and a supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Other prominent Russian businessmen who have died suddenly in recent months include the chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer, which had called for an end to the war. The state news media said that the executive, Ravil Maganov, had fallen from a sixth-floor hospital window in September.
