From Fortune Magazine:
What happens when you get drunk and kill Putin's friend with your snowplow?
If there’s one person whose shoes you don’t want to be in right now, it’s Vladimir Martynenko.
Martynenko is the unlucky guy who happened to drive his snowplow across the runway as Total CEO Christophe de Margerie’s executive jet was preparing to take off from the VIP terminal at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport last night.
That would be enough to have on your conscience at the best of times. And it wouldn’t make you feel any better to think that you were drunk at the time.
But the real downer would be that you had just killed one of the closest and most influential friends of an authoritarian President with well-documented anger management problems and roots in one of the most brutal organizations ever to have graced the planet. That last consideration, I’m thinking, would probably be the one that occupied your thoughts the most while you sat out 48 hours of detention before seeing the magistrate.
A bit more:
Meanwhile, back in the cells, Mr. Martynenko might–mind I said “might”–just also spare a thought for his boss, Vnukovo’s CEO Vasily Alexandrov, after seeing comments from Vladimir Markin, spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee. The IC is undisputed king of the beasts in the jungle of Russia’s judicial system, and Markin signalled Tuesday that the buck for this one was going to stop a lot higher than Martynenko.
“It’s obvious that what happened was not at all a tragic confluence of events, as the airport’s management is trying to present,” Markin said, “but rather a criminal connivance by management.” He added that more would be suspended while the Committee conducted its investigation. His colleague Ivan Sibul was quoted as saying that there were reasons to believe that the dispatchers, too, were under the influence (we should note that reports say a lawyer for Martynenko said he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident).
I would just hang myself in the jail cell before they did it for me...
