Metro

Mogul smirks at ex ‘abuse’ claim

A billionaire Russian oligarch chillingly smirked as his ex-wife testified in a Connecticut courtroom yesterday to being viciously abused by him for years — once even suffering a miscarriage, allegedly at his hands.

“I don’t understand what’s so funny here,” snapped Tatiana Panchenkova as her ex-husband, Shalva Chigirinsky, smiled complacently while she described how he allegedly threw her out of their Moscow residence in 2001 while she was pregnant with their first child.

“For me, this is emotionally difficult,” said Panchenkova, who is suing the real-estate and oil mogul for the alleged long-term abuse that continued even after their 2009 divorce. Both now live in Greenwich.

“I suffered as a mother, I suffered as a woman,” said Panchenkova, 48, about a separate alleged attack she said led to a miscarriage.

Four years after that, also in Moscow, she awoke to find him trying to suffocate her with a pillow, she said.

The next day he told his lawyer “he wanted to kill me, but didn’t know how to dispose of the body,” Panchenkova testified.

Chigirinsky, 62, coolly smiled during Panchenkova’s testimony, where the mother of his four kids detailed 10 incidents of alleged “physical force, beatings, causing me physical injury..”

“I was hospitalized on a number of occasions,” Panchenkova said under questioning by her lawyer Mark Sherman.

“I was threatened that I’d be destroyed, killed, taken out if I contacted the police.”

Her testimony came as part of her bid to force Chigirinsky to set aside $2.5 million to secure any damages she might win when her suit goes to trial.

Chigirinsky was once one of Russia’s richest men, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion in 2007, but he was rocked by the 2008 financial meltdown.

Panchenkova said “the breaking point” that led her to sue was their daughter’s 11th birthday party in early 2012.

“In the presence of the children he said he was going to kill me. Called me garbage, a bitch. He said he would create a miserable life for me every day.”