Mystery Deepens Over Death of Former Putin Ally Mikhail Lesin
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/us/former-putin-aide-found-in-washington-died-from-blows-to-head.html?_r=1By NICHOLAS FANDOS and STEVEN LEE MYERSMARCH 10, 2016
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Mikhail Y. Lesin Credit Sergei Ilntsky/European Pressphoto Agency
WASHINGTON — Mikhail Y. Lesin once occupied the upper stratosphere of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, an advertising executive turned cabinet minister who helped carry out the state takeover of the country’s independent media and later created the Kremlin’s global English-language television network.
Until late 2014 he ran the media wing of the state’s energy giant, Gazprom, before stepping down or, more likely, being forced out. He ended up in the United States, where he and his family owned properties in Los Angeles said to be worth far more than the salary of the former government minister. And then, in November, he was found in a hotel here in Washington, the victim, the Russian state media he had helped build said, of a heart attack.
On Thursday, more than four months later, one of the questions surrounding Mr. Lesin’s death was answered: The office of the chief medical examiner in Washington announced that he had not died of a heart attack, but rather of blunt force injuries to his head. But the mystery surrounding his rise and fall only deepened.
Although the examiner and the police did not declare his death a criminal act, the authorities clearly no longer consider it to be the result of natural causes. Mr. Lesin’s body also showed signs of blunt trauma to his neck, torso, arms and legs, the result, according to one official, of some sort of altercation that happened before he returned to his room at the Dupont Circle Hotel on the night in November when he died at the age of 59.
The medical examiner’s office did not explain the timing of its announcement, nor why the findings took so long. Officials there had said as recently as Wednesday that it would not imminently release its findings, only to reverse course the next day. His death remains the subject of a police investigation, though spokesmen for the Metropolitan Police Department and the F.B.I. in Washington declined to comment.
For months, Mr. Lesin’s fate has been the subject of much speculation. In the Russian news media, he was said to have had a falling out with a major shareholder of Gazprom Media, Yuri V. Kovalchuk, an even closer business ally and friend of Mr. Putin’s. Some speculated that he had fled to the United States in a kind of self-exile, one that is not unknown among ministers and businessmen who once were in favor inside Mr. Putin’s Kremlin.
Karen Dawisha, a professor at Miami University and the author of “Putin’s Kleptocracy” about corruption among Putin’s allies, said that Mr. Lesin’s close ties to the Kremlin and its formal and informal controls over the media made him an improbable exile in the United States. “He knew more than most about the system’s dark center,” she said.
Mr. Lesin began his rise to power in the Russian media after the fall of the Soviet Union, leveraging a successful foray into advertising into a top government post and, eventually, a lucrative job as an executive at Gazprom’s media branch. He served as a minister overseeing the media from 1999 to 2004, a period that coincided with Mr. Putin’s first term as president and a steady expansion of state control over television in particular. Mr. Lesin was an instrumental figure in those efforts to take control of the country’s media. He later served as a presidential adviser, with a mandate to help develop the government’s growing technology and media apparatus.
Mr. Lesin’s wealth, and his holdings in the United States, had already attracted suspicion. In July 2014, Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, asked the Justice Department to investigate what he said was suspicion of wrongdoing under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He cited Mr. Lesin’s properties in Europe, the British Virgin Islands, and Los Angeles, saying the Los Angeles properties were worth $28 million. He also suggested that his close ties to Russians subject to sanctions, including Mr. Kovalchuk and the bank he built, Bank Rossiya, warranted an investigation. “That a Russian public servant could have amassed the considerable funds required to acquire and maintain these assets in Europe and the United States raises serious questions,” Mr. Wicker wrote.
Mr. Lesin, for his part, denied that he had purchased the properties, telling the Russian edition of Forbes that the properties belonged to his children. He called the accusations slanderous.
It does not appear that Mr. Wicker’s accusations prompted any investigation. In the days after his death on the night of Nov. 4, neither the local police nor federal investigators appeared overly alarmed. One law enforcement official said there were no obvious signs of forced entry or foul play in his hotel room. Mr. Lesin did, however, appear disheveled when he returned to the hotel, according to the video surveillance cameras, the official said. But the Russian state media, including the English-language state television network that Mr. Lesin helped found, known as RT, reported that he had died from a heart attack.
