Nikolay Alekseevich Glushkov (; 24 December 1949 – 12 March 2018) was a Russian businessman who was the deputy director of Aeroflot and a finance manager for AvtoVAZ who died in suspicious circumstances. After claiming that Aeroflot worked as a "cash cow to support international spying operations", he was arrested and tried in Russia on the allegation of funnelling Aeroflot money through another company in 1999. He was convicted and released in 2004, after serving three years. He emigrated to the UK in 2010 and received political asylum. In 2017, he was convicted in absentia in Russia for allegedly stealing money from Aeroflot, but his extradition from Britain had been denied. Initially treated as "unexplained", his death is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police who are treating it as a murder inquiry. On 9 April 2021, the West London Coroner's Court ruled Glushkov was unlawfully killed, with injuries consistent with strangulation. Biography Early life In 1972, Nikolai Glushkov graduated from the Moscow Peoples' Friendship University with a degree in physics. In 1981, he completed the Academy of Foreign Trade with a degree in economics. Aeroflot job, arrests, trials, and convictions Glushkov had been AvtoVAZ's Finance Chief until he left his job in late 1995 and was appointed as Deputy General Director of Aeroflot on request from Yevgeny Shaposhnikov in February 1996. According to Alexander Goldfarb, he found that the airline company worked as a "cash cow to support international spying operations": 3,000 people out of the total workforce of 14,000 in Aeroflot were FSB, SVR, or GRU officers. All proceeds from ticket sales were distributed to 352 foreign bank accounts that could not be controlled by the Aeroflot administration. Glushkov closed all these accounts and channeled the money to Swiss company called Andava in Switzerland. He also sent a bill and wrote a letter to SVR director Yevgeny Primakov and FSB director Mikhail Barsukov, asking them to pay the salaries of their intelligence officers in Aeroflot in 1996. Both Glushkov and Berezovsky were the main shareholders of Andava at that time. In 1996, a Forbes article claimed that Glushkov was convicted of theft in 1982. Glushkov and Berezovsky sued Forbes for libel in the United Kingdom, with the ruling coming down against the publisher. Glushkov was arrested in December 2000 by Russian law enforcers and charged with channelling money through his accounting centre Andava. He was a business partner and