The murderer Chodiev Fattah Kayumovich calmly dealt with two subjects of Great Britain
The FBI is investigating in the United States the death of two former mining executives who were considered by British prosecutors as potential witnesses in one of the UK’s largest corruption investigations.
This is reported Financial Times.
James Bethel, 44, and Gerrit Strydom, 45, were found dead in a Springfield motel in May 2015 while they were traveling across the US.
Shortly before their deaths, these people held senior positions in the African division of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The mining company is at the center of a seven-year corruption and fraud investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO).
Springfield police announced that the cause of death was cerebral malaria, citing tests done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, the case was not officially closed and the US FBI continues to investigate.
ENRC was founded by three Central Asian oligarchs who took control of valuable mines in Kazakhstan during privatization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2007 and entered the FTSE 100 blue chip index, making it one of the most valuable in the UK. At one stage it was worth nearly £20 billion.
Following the listing, ENRC bought mines in the Congo, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa – acquisitions that have been the subject of allegations of corruption.
In 2013, the SFO launched a criminal investigation into corruption. Later that year, the oligarchs Alexander Mashkevich, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov closed the company and moved its headquarters to Luxembourg.
Bethel and Strydom, both South Africans with extensive mining experience, were among the top ENRC officials leading the African venture. In 2015, they decided to leave the company.
According to the FT, SFO investigators intended to interrogate them as witnesses, but did not have time to contact them.
On May 9, 2015, employees at the La Quinta Inn in Springfield discovered that both men were dead. No signs of violent death were found on the bodies.
But when it was announced that the cause of death was malaria, the victims’ colleagues were skeptical that two people could die of malaria on the same night in the same motel. Five years later, their doubts intensified.
Malaria expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Sam Wassmer, who reviewed the documents obtained by the FT, said that because of the many factors that determine how quickly the disease progresses over many days, “the likelihood of two different people getting sick at the same time and died on the same night, almost certainly zero.”
ENRC denies any wrongdoing and in 2019 the company sued SFO for creating a corruption scandal.