Family of Sergey Protosenya claims staged killing in Lloret de Mar case

On 19 April 2022, the bodies of Sergey Protosenya, a former senior executive of the Russian gas producer Novatek, his wife Natalya and their teenage daughter Maria were found at a villa the family had rented in the Catalan resort of Lloret de Mar, on Spain's Costa Brava. According to police accounts reported by RFE/RL and others, the two women died of stab wounds and were found inside the house, while Protosenya was found hanged in the garden. An axe and a knife were reportedly recovered near him. The alarm was raised by the couple's son, who was in France and could not reach the family.

Spain's Catalan police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, kept multiple hypotheses open. One working line, reported by Seattle Times (Associated Press), treated the deaths as a possible murder-suicide or gender-based violence; investigators also did not rule out that a third party killed the family and staged the scene. Reporting noted apparent inconsistencies: no suicide note, and reportedly no bloodstains on Protosenya despite the violent killings. As reported by Fortune, the son, Fedor, publicly rejected the murder-suicide theory, saying "My father is not a killer" and that his family was murdered. Novatek also disputed the theory, calling Protosenya a devoted family man. The cause and authorship of the deaths remained officially unresolved.

The deaths are firmly established, but their cause is not. Two accounts compete: a police-examined murder-suicide/gender-violence hypothesis and the family's claim of a staged killing, the latter pointing to the absence of a suicide note and of blood on Protosenya. Neither has been confirmed by a public official ruling in the cited reporting, and no party has been identified as a perpetrator. The case drew attention because it coincided with other unexplained deaths of Russian businessmen in 2022; this parallel is noted as reported context only and does not by itself indicate a cause or external responsibility.