LONDON, May 4 (RIA Novosti) – The funeral of the Russian-born businessman Boris Berezovsky will take place on May 6, UK police confirmed on Friday.
A police spokeswoman said the body of the self-exiled tycoon, who was found dead at his UK home on March 23, had been released to his relatives, and that the funeral would take place in the county of Surrey in southeast England.
Berezovsky’s family does not want to make public any further details of the funeral, a source close to the late businessman’s social circle told RIA Novosti on Saturday.
The official cause of death has not yet been announced, but a post-mortem examination carried out on the 67-year-old former billionaire, whose body was discovered in the bathroom of his home in Ascot in southern England, found that the cause of death was consistent with hanging. Police said at the time there was nothing to indicate a violent struggle, and have subsequently conducted toxicology and tissue tests on the body, the results of which are expected to help determine the exact cause of death.
Under President Boris Yeltsin, Berezovsky was known as Russia’s “kingmaker.” He was a trusted figure at the very heart of the Kremlin and was central to Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in the late 1990s.
After Putin took office, however, Berezovsky’s relationship with the Kremlin quickly soured.
The Russian oligarch had lived in self-imposed exile in Britain as an avowed Kremlin foe since 2000 until his death. Russian authorities had launched a dozen cases against him on numerous charges, including fraud, failing to repatriate foreign currency revenues and abuse of office.
