Shortly after Perepilichnyy’s death, Medynska set up a fashion business in Paris and rebranded herself Elmira Medins. Her Instagram feed features glamorous selfies snapped at five-star hotels and exclusive restaurants in Paris, Dubai, and Milan. She has held couture shows at the Bristol, where she stayed with Perepilichnyy, and posted photographs at the Four Seasons, where they dined. She said references to her time studying and doing business in Russia on her website were a mistake, and, after BuzzFeed News approached her, they disappeared.

Several months after Perepilichnyy’s body was found in Surrey, Medynska said, she received an email from a British investigator, who said her messages had been found on the dead man’s phone and asked if she had met him in Paris. She replied that she had, and received a second email asking if she knew four other women with whom Perepilichnyy had been connected. She didn’t know the other women, but said she replied, giving her mobile number and offering to travel to England to help with any investigation if the investigator could get her a visa. She said she never heard from him again and that no other authority has ever approached her.

A Surrey police detective told the coroner that police were aware Perepilichnyy had met with a "Ukrainian national" in Paris and said officers had tried to call her "at first", but "that wasn't successful". Instead, he said, "we thought it would be best to email her". No formal interview was conducted, and no statement taken – meaning Perepilichnyy’s inquest will hear no evidence from the woman with whom he spent his last two days.



The inquest, which will seek to establish Perepilichnyy’s cause of death, opened on June 5 and is set to run for several weeks. It will hear conflicting evidence from the police toxicologist who ruled out poison in the initial postmortem and threw away most of Perepilichnyy's stomach contents, and the independent plant expert who later identified traces of gelsemium in what remained of the sample from the dead man’s stomach.

The hearing is being hotly contested by four interested parties. The US financier Bill Browder is investigating the $230 million fraud Perepilichnyy exposed, because the money was stolen from taxes paid by his Moscow-based hedge fund, Hermitage Capital Management. His lawyers argue that the Russian was murdered for blowing the whistle. Representatives of Perepilichnyy’s life insurance company, Legal & General, which ordered the tests that detected the gelsemium traces, are also arguing the case for murder. On the opposing side are lawyers for Surrey police, who maintain Perepilichnyy died of natural causes. The detective chief inspector in charge of the case said in a statement to the coroner that the investigation was “perhaps the most rigorous enquiry into a sudden and unexplained death” he had ever seen. BuzzFeed News has learned that the police lawyers intend to rely on evidence from experts who will dispute the gelsemium finding during upcoming hearings.

Perepilichnyy’s widow, Tatiana, is also represented, and maintained in her evidence last week that her husband died naturally. In a statement released to the press on the eve of the inquest, her lawyer said she believed "the tragic death of her husband has been overshadowed by stereotypes towards successful Russian businesspeople that have been orchestrated by Legal and General and Hermitage," and accused the two companies of having "tarnished Alexander Perepilichnyy’s good name". It said she had never been aware of any threats to her husband's life during their 20 years of marriage and did not believe that he had been poisoned. Hermitage, ​the statement said, had used her husband's death "to promote and advance their wider and long running campaign against President Putin and the Russian authorities" and had done so "with little or no regard to the damaging impact this publicity has had, and continues to have, on her family and their business interests in Russia".