On the evening of March 8, the former editor-in-chief of radio station “Echo Moskvi” Alexey Venediktov published photos of a collective letter of Russian oppositionists, the main signatory of which turned out to be Alexei Navalny’s political representative, Leonid Volkov. In this letter, the opposition asked the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Giuseppe Borrell, to lift the sanctions against the Russian oligarch Piotr Aven. On the morning of March 9, Leonid Volkov admitted that he had signed a letter in defense of the oligarch and announced that he “decided to take a break from his social and political activities.” This is not the first scandal in the last few weeks in which Piotr Aven’s name is mentioned. Who exactly is Latvian citizen, Russian oligarch Pyotr Avens, and why did signing his letter of support cost Alexei Navalny’s chief representative abroad his job?
Villa with award
162 kilometers from Riga and 8.5 kilometers from Madona, in the corner of a picturesque forest between two lakes – Mazo Klaugi and Lielo Klaugi – on a 60-hectare plot of land, there is a model villa of modernism, which is more like the terminal of a small airport. This architectural object includes not only the owner’s house, but also a guest house, a gatekeeper’s cabin, a separate sauna and even a helipad. The author of the project is one of the most stylish and expensive Russian architects of the time – Totan Kuzembayev. The value of the object has never been made public.
Pyotr Aven was born in Moscow in 1955 “with a silver spoon in his mouth”. His father is Oļegs Avens, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a Bolshevik from generation to generation, the son of the Latvian archer Jānis Avens. His father was a Chekist
