A US judge has approved the divorce of Vladimir Gusinsky and his wife of 33 years, Elena Konstantinou, after an acrimonious, three-year legal fight in which the once-powerful Russian oligarch declared he was all but broke.
The ruling by a Connecticut Superior Court judge was the latest in a series of troubles afflicting Gusinsky, who was forced into exile in the early 2000s by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose government took over the hard-charging NTV, a private TV channel Gusinsky founded.
Neither Gusinsky nor Konstantinou responded to requests for comment.
In 2022, citing "irreconcilable differences," Konstantinou sued Gusinsky for divorce in Connecticut, where the couple had long owned a $7 million, 14,000-square-foot mansion in the elite New York suburb of Greenwich. Gusinsky now lives full-time in Israel.
In the 12-page ruling, dated June 23 and obtained by RFE/RL, Judge Michael D'Agostino recounted Gusinsky at his height of power in the 1990s, when NTV was an influential channel. Gusinsky and his media holdings played a pivotal role in supporting Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Forced Into Exile
After being jailed in 2000, compelled to give up control of NTV to the state-controlled gas company Gazprom, and forced into exile, Gusinsky built another lucrative business, producing and selling Russian-language TV series to Russian channels, and later Ukrainian channels.
That line of business began to falter around 2014, D'Agostino said after Western sanctions were imposed on Russia in response to its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula and after a "falling-out with the [Russian] government."
That appears to be a reference to a decision by Gazprom Media holding to cut back on buying Gusinsky's TV serials. According to people knowledgeable about the discussions, the man in charge of that decision was Mikhail Lesin, a former Kremlin press minister.
Lesin, who was later pushed out of his job at Gazprom Media, was found dead in a Washington, D.C. hotel room on November 5, 2015, under mysterious circumstances. The official autopsy, obtained exclusively by RFE/RL, found that the hyoid bone in Lesin's neck was broken, raising questions about the official explanation released by Washington police and the US Department of Justice.
By late 2018, Gusinsky's finances were in a dire state, and he was selling off business and assets, borrowing substantial loans from banks and private individuals. He was sued in multiple jurisdictions in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, for failing to repay millions of dollars in various loans.
Gusinsky drew scrutiny from the FBI, which questioned Konstantinou and employees of their Greenwich mansion about a host of his business dealings. That included his relationship with former FBI special agent Charles McGonigal and Sergei Shestakov, a former diplomat and business associate of McGonigal's who had worked for Gusinsky.
Foreclosure Fight
In court declarations filed as part of the divorce proceedings, Gusinsky declared he had no income and his only assets were the Greenwich mansion he shared with Konstantinou, and another Greenwich mansion located several kilometers away.
That second mansion has been the focus of a brutal foreclosure fight that has pitted Gusinsky against a former friend and employee named Vladimir Lenskiy -- in "what has been described as the longest running foreclosure litigation in the state of Connecticut," D'Agostino wrote.
Gusinsky "claims that all of his millions are gone, that he used any money he had to pay debts, and that he has nothing more squirreled away in any accounts, anyway," D'Agostino said. However, the judge also stated his financial declarations were not credible, given that Gusinsky was paying lawyers for years as part of the foreclosure fight over the second mansion.
Gusinsky "abandoned" Konstantinou, the judge said, and "candidly testified" that he left the United States to move to Israel for "tax and business" reasons.
The judge, who ordered a nominal annual alimony payment of $1, also ruled that Konstantinou would receive ownership of the primary Greenwich mansion, along with various artwork and jewelry that was in dispute.
The second mansion, whose foreclosure is still ongoing, remains Gusinsky's, D'Agostino ordered.
In his ruling, D'Agostino said he was sympathetic to Konstantinou, arguing that she had been devoted, and wholly dependent on, Gusinsky, throughout his rise and fall.
And he cited a passage from the famed 20th century Russian novel The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov:
"Like Bulgakov's Margarita, [Konstantinou] would indeed 'pawn her soul to the devil to find out whether he is alive or dead.'"
