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Home / World

Inquest could throw light on Russian link

By Patrick Sawer
NZ Herald·
8 Nov, 2015 09:15 PM4 mins to read

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Trinny Woodall

Trinny Woodall

When Johnny Elichaoff - the former husband of TV presenter Trinny Woodall - fell to his death last November it sparked renewed speculation about the number of his friends and associates who had died in mysterious circumstances.

In March 2013, Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who lived in exile in Britain after falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was found dead at his Berkshire home with a ligature round his neck.

Then, in December last year, wealthy tycoon Scott Young - who had earlier been hung head first from a window of the Dorchester Hotel over unpaid debts - fell to his death from his London penthouse.

Soon observers were speculating that the deaths - along with the demise of others in their circle - might be connected to the murky world of Russian business.

Sources began coming forward to claim the deaths were neither suicide nor accident.

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Now new light is to be shed on one of those fatal incidents, when the inquest into Elichaoff's death opens at Westminster Coroner's Court tonight New Zealand time.

Elichaoff, 55, was killed when he fell from the roof of Whiteley's shopping centre in Bayswater, west London, in November last year.

An antiques dealer and former rock drummer, Elichaoff had reportedly shut down some of his businesses in the weeks before his death and may have been in financial difficulties.

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It was also claimed that weeks earlier he had to be talked down from the same spot on the shopping centre roof from where he later fell.

Woodall, who had a daughter with Elichaoff and remained close to him after the couple split in 2009, was said to have been devastated by his death.

She later said: "I think you can slowly come to terms with it and life moves on ... We're a tiny cog in a very large wheel, you have something that is quite direct personal tragedy but we're part of this huge picture as well.

"It's about picking up the reins again and moving forward and picking up things I was doing before that event and moving forward with my life."

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Elichaoff had worked as a touring drummer for U2, Siouxsie Sioux and the League of Gentlemen in the 80s. In 1984, he left the tour circuit to join the Israeli Army, from which he moved into music management.

He later became a life insurance, inheritance tax adviser and antiques dealer.

What is not known is whether Elichaoff had been drawn into the same world of Russian business as some of his friends, and whether he owed substantial sums of money to unsavoury and dangerous individuals.

His death came a month before that of his friend Young, who had made a fortune in the London property market but had been badly hit in the recession and was left struggling with huge debts.

His former wife Michelle said he had grown increasingly secretive about the deals he was doing and rumours circulated that he was involved in a number of ventures linked to players in the Russian underworld.

But by 2006 things had begun to fall apart.

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Young told friends his fortune was wiped out when a large property deal in Moscow went wrong, leaving its investors - including Berezovsky - with huge debts.

Shortly after his death friends said that in 2012 Young had received a warning over his unpaid debts from members of the Russian mafia, who hung him out of a window at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane as a threat to pay up.

An inquest in July found that Young's death could not be ruled as suicide because of insufficient evidence about his state of mind.

There had already been an inconclusive verdict on the death of Berezovsky, after an inquest in March last year heard conflicting expert evidence about his death.

Police said they found no evidence of foul play and the pathologist who conducted a post-mortem examination on Berezovsky's body said he could rule out murder.

But intrigue deepened when Professor Bern Brinkmann, a German forensic scientist retained by the businessman's family, said his examination of autopsy photographs led him to conclude that Berezovsky had not killed himself.

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