[2] On 9 April 2021, the West London Coroner's Court ruled Glushkov was unlawfully killed, with injuries consistent with strangulation.
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.
[4] According to Alexander Goldfarb, he found that the airline company worked as a "cash cow to support international spying operations":[5] 3,000 people out of the total workforce of 14,000 in Aeroflot were FSB, SVR, or GRU officers.
[7][8] Glushkov was arrested in December 2000 by Russian law enforcers and charged with channelling money through his accounting centre Andava.
He had no intention of escaping and "was walking in his slippers to the hospital gate to go home for the night, with his guards' knowledge, as he had done a few days earlier".
He was cleared of the original fraud and money laundering charges by the court in March 2004, but found guilty of attempted escape and "abuse of authority"[5] and sentenced to 3 years and 3 months of imprisonment.
In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, Glushkov was sentenced to eight years in prison for allegedly stealing $123 million from Aeroflot.
His death was initially treated by police as unexplained and came a week after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, which along with his reputation as a critic of the Putin government, was said to be the reason for putting the Counter Terrorism Command in charge of the investigation.