Of all the beaches that Russian oligarch Vladislav Baumgertner’s corpse could’ve washed up on it just had to be one within goddamned Akrotiri and Dhekelia – a British armed forces “sovereign base area” on Cyprus retained after the rest of the island gained its independence in 1960 – leaving the local UK military police unit stuck investigating a death they had nothing to do with, the AP reports.
Baumgertner, 53, had been the CEO of Uralkali, Russia’s largest potash concern until 2013 when he’d been pushed out after pissing off Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and spending two months in jail in Minsk over some deal that fell apart. Having moved to Cyprus, the forcibly-retired businessman was living in an apartment in a large Russian expatriate community in nearby Limassol.
That is until January 7th when he was last seen before presumably called to meet a hot date at a spot on top of a tall seaside cliff or was force-fed a few gallons of vodka on a dock at 3:30 AM or whatever it was this time. Guess his apartment’s on the second floor and they were worried he might suffer a broken ankle or fractured hip so they had to put more time and work into this job.
They could’ve at least weighed him down with an anchor or something. Pretty inconsiderate to the British military cops used to investigating drunken fistfights between soldiers and sailors at the base pubs and not the ceaseless, inhumanly fratricidal workings of the Russian business community.