Here is a column I wrote, under the pen-name of Desiderius Erasmus an old Dutch philosopher, for a monthly Illinois newsletter on the Second Amendment. Old Desiderius’ motto was In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King, which meant that you didn’t have to be perfect in your skillset, just better than your opponent. In Latin, the phrase is “in regione caecorum rex est luscus.”
In regione caecorum rex est luscus
In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King
By “Desiderius Erasmus,” a GSL member
Death by Toad Poison
So you get a call from Lukoil Oil Company in Moscow. Or another Russian energy company. They want you as a senior executive. Somewhere north of $20,000,000 a year salary. New S680 Mercedes-Benz Maybach – every year. Your own executive jet and crew. Eight weeks paid vacation annually. Huge mansion. Tell us what else you want and we’ll accommodate it.
Sounds great. But just say “No.” Because Lukoil and the other energy giants have maybe the worst retirement plans on earth. They’re short and certainly not sweet. Mikhail Rogachev, former vice-president of Yukos oil was found dead in October 2024 at the entrance to his home in Moscow. The guy who found him was an employee of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, and said the injuries were characteristic of a fall.
He lived on the tenth floor. State news say it was suicide, and that he left a note. His family says no way. What was the SVR guy doing there? He said he had been walking his boss’s dog when he saw the body.
Last May, former top Lukoil manager Alexander Subbotin died under “mysterious circumstances” in “the basement of the home of a shaman.” The Russian news agency said Alex had died of a heart attack after consuming toad poison. Another source said that Alex had heard that the shaman had a really good hangover cure involving the toads. And I thought that was hair of the dog. Who knew?
Leonid Shulman, the head of the transport service at Gazprom Invest, which handles investment projects for state-owned gas giant, was found dead in a cottage north of St Petersburg in January
2022 just a month before the 2nd Russian invasion of the Ukraine – the first was in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimea. He died in Gazprom’s heavily-guarded Leninsky corporate village in the Leningrad region, near St Petersburg. That’s odd, as Leonid was found dead with multiple stab wounds in a pool of blood on his bathroom floor. So we can rule out suicide, I think.
In September 2022, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, was found dead after falling from a sixth floor window at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital. Lukoil said Maganov had died :after a serious illness: after hospitalization for a severe heart attack. Unfortunately, close circuit TV footage was not available because cameras had been “turned off for repairs.” Jeffrey Epstein could tell you how often happens.
Nooses and pistols, axes and knives. Sergey Protosenya, former top manager of Russia’s energy giant Novatek, was found hanged in the garden of the villa in Lloret de Mar by Catalonian police on April 19, 2022, Spanish media reported, while his wife and daughter were found in their beds with blunt axe wounds and knife stab wounds on their bodies.
An axe and a knife were found next to his body. Spanish media theorized that either Sergey killed his wife and daughter and then hanged himself, or the entire family was murdered and the crime scene later staged to appear as a murder-suicide. The day before, former vice-president of Gazprom Bank, Vladislav Avaev was found dead in his ritzy apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, along with his wife and daughter.
The apartment was locked from the inside; a pistol was found in Avaev’s hands, leading the theory that Vlad shot his wife and his 13-year-old daughter before killing himself. And Yuri Voronov, CEO of a subcontractor of Gazprom, was found in a swimming pool, dead, on July 4, 2022, of gunshot wounds to the head. A pistol was; the casings were found at the bottom of the pool at his home in the ultra-wealthy Vyborgsky district of the Leningrad region. C’mon, man! They’re going to have to drain the pool!
Why could all this be happening? The New York Times uses the phrase: “Under Murky Circumstances.” In a statement to customers, staff and shareholders, in 2022, Lukoil’s board of directors called “for the soonest termination of the armed conflict” in Ukraine. Maybe somebody didn’t like that.
To be sure, all the deaths are not necessarily connected. It is far more likely some really are suicides (I think that suicide rate in Russia is the third-highest in the world.) Some could be killings by competing influential clans to wipe out competitors without a centralized Kremlin effort led by Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin has denied responsibility for any of the deaths.
Sir William Felix Browder, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, who was deported from Russia because his investment strategy supported shareholder rights activism for companies HCM supported in Russia, has his own theory. The sanctions imposed by the West against Moscow because of the Ukraine war meant that the economic “pie has shrunk.” And, “Whenever there’s limited resources and very powerful people – people start getting killed.”
Death by toad poison. How fitting.