Ksenia Sobchak
(Picture: AP)The glamorous daughter of Vladimir Putin’s former boss has reportedly fled Russia as investigators raided her luxury Moscow pad.
Ksenia Sobchak, 40, a socialite once dubbed the “Russian Paris Hilton”, is believed to be in hiding after her media director was arrested on charges of extortion.
The state Tass news agency claimed Sobchak had bought tickets to Dubai and Turkey to mislead the authorities but eventually left for Belarus, from where she moved to Lithuania.
The TV star, who has often been critical of Putin, has provoked many Russian opposition figures including Alexei Navalny who have accused her of serving the Kremlin’s agenda.
Investigators said that the search at Sobchak’s luxury home in a prestigious Moscow suburb was part of a probe into alleged wrongdoing by her media director, Kirill Sukhanov, who was arrested on charges of extortion.
Sobchak on Tuesday rejected the accusations against Mr Sukhanov as “ravings and nonsense” and described his arrest as part of the authorities’ efforts to stifle independent media.
Sobchak said on her Telegram channel that Mr Sukhanov had not been in touch with her since the morning.
“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov has been detained. They say it’s for extortion,” she wrote. “It’s just nonsense.”
“I and my entire editorial staff regard this as ANOTHER squeeze on journalism in the country…they keep detaining my journalists all the time. Now they have taken up Kirill and are making up a case for him. [His] lawyer is in touch with him.
“We are watching,” she added.
The reports claimed that investigators suspected Sobchak of being involved in the extortion scheme along with her media director and alleged that a warrant was issued for her arrest.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, argued that the raid has sent a signal to members of the Russian elite that all bets are off.
“If they can arrest the daughter of Putin’s patron ... it means there are no untouchables,” Mr Markov wrote in a commentary. “For some members of the elites, an arrest warrant for Sobchak is a blazing sign in the skies.”
In 2018, she became a liberal challenger in Russia’s presidential election, finishing a distant fourth with about 1.7% of the vote in what her critics described as a Kremlin effort to add a democratic veneer to Putin’s sweeping re-election.
Sobchak is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, a liberal mayor of St Petersburg for whom Putin served as a deputy in the 1990s.
Sobchak has 9.4 million followers on Instagram, and her glamour and sharp wit and have made her both loved by many.
She got involved in politics when she joined the massive protests in Moscow against Putin in 2011-12, and later reinvented herself as a serious TV journalist and opposition activist.
Sobchak has denied serving the Kremlin’s agenda by running as a challenger to Putin in 2018.
But opposition leader Alexei Navalny denounced her for discrediting the opposition by joining the race, saying that she was a “parody of a liberal candidate” and her involvement in the campaign helped the Kremlin cast the opposition in a negative light.
