Also for the Principality on the Rock, the backdrop to fairy tales of luxury and riches, there was a first time.
“It looked like a war scene”: the concept recurs several times in the comments of Monegasques in shock, of neighbors following the most serious act of violence ever remembered at the Grimaldi court. A frightening explosion, the glass of many windows shattered in the border area with France and rubble in the home of the family of the Ukrainian tycoon Vadim Ermolaev, the man targeted.
The 58-year-old oligarch, who was returning home, was saved but is in very serious conditions, between life and death. A very confidential prognosis also for his wife, who one of the witnesses, the man who called for help, reported having seen “without her feet” while she was being taken away by the ambulance. Then his son, a thirteen-year-old, also injured but not seriously. “It is not an attack”, sources close to the investigation repeated today until the concept was clarified: it is an “attempted multiple murder”, but perhaps the prosecutor Stéphane Thibault wanted to protect the Principality at least from the possibility of terrorism.
The man, caught by surveillance cameras as he left the entrance to Ermolaev’s house, was recognised, identified and the Monegasque and especially the French gendarmerie are on his trail.
The killer, it seems, fled immediately crossing the border and, for the moment, vanishing into the French hinterland. Given the position of Ermolaev, who renounced his Ukrainian citizenship in favor of Cypriot citizenship, he is subjected to sanctions by decree promulgated by Volodymyr Zelensky. Trafficking of billions, sums reclaimed from his Estonian financial institution and accusations of money laundering, make the investigators think of a kind of high-level settling of scores, with a killer hired to eliminate the tycoon, resident in Monaco where his luxurious life, car, yacht and billionaire’s villa, did not go unnoticed: “We have a single man who showed up in front of the door – said the prosecutor in the press conference – he deposited an object which we are examining, just immediately after the three occupants of the ground floor apartment presented themselves at the entrance.